(Routledge Studies On The Arab - Israeli Conflict, 9) Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi - Palestinian Refugees - Identity, Space and Place in The Levant-Routledge (2010)

Palestinian Refugees
More than four million Palestinian refugees live in protracted exile across the
Middle East. Taking a regional approach to Palestinian refugee exile and aliena-
tion across the Levant, this book proposes a new understanding of the spatial and
political dimensions of refugee camps across the Middle East.
Combining critical scholarship with ethnographic insight, the essays uncover
host states’ marginalisation of stateless refugees and shed light on new terminology
of refugees, migration and diaspora studies. The impact on the refugee commu-
nity is detailed in novel studies of refugee identity, memory and practice and new
legal approaches to compensation and ‘right of return’. The book opens a critical
debate on key concepts and proposes a new understanding of the spatial and politi-
cal dimensions of refugee camps, better understood as laboratories of Palestinian
society and ‘state-in-making’.
This strong collection of original essays is an essential resource for scholars and
students in refugee studies, forced migration, disaster studies, legal anthropology,
urban studies, international law and Middle East history.
Are Knudsen is a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in

Bergen, Norway. He has published on Islamism among Palestinian refugees
in Lebanon, political Islam in Palestine and political violence in post-civil war
Lebanon. He is currently involved in research on conflict and co-existence in
post-civil war Lebanon, Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and the democratic
turn within Hamas.
Sari Hanafi is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral

Sciences at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. He has written
extensively on economic sociology and network analysis of the Palestinian diaspora,
relationships between diaspora and centre, political sociology and sociology of
migration (mainly about the Palestinian refugees) and sociology of the new actors
in international relations (non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and interna-
tional NGOs).
Routledge studies on the Arab-Israeli conflict
Series Editor: Mick Dumper, University of Exeter
The Arab–Israeli conflict continues to be the centre of academic and popular

attention. This series brings together the best of the cutting-edge work now being
undertaken by predominantly new and young scholars. Although largely falling
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1 International Assistance to the 6 Zionist Israel and Apartheid

Palestinians after Oslo South Africa
Political guilt, wasted money Civil society and peace building in
Anne Le More ethnic-national states
Amneh Daoud Badran
2 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Identity and community 7 The Political Right in Israel
Esmail Nashif Different faces of Jewish populism
Dani Filc
3 Understanding the Middle East
Peace Process 8 Reparations to Palestinian
Israeli academia and the struggle Refugees
for identity A comparative perspective
Asima A. Ghazi-Bouillon Shahira Samy
4 Palestinian Civil Society 9 Palestinian Refugees

Foreign donors and the power to Identity, space and place in the
promote and exclude Levant
Benoît Challand Edited by Are Knudsen and
Sari Hanafi
5 The Jewish–Arab City
Spatio-politics in a mixed
community
Haim Yacobi
Palestinian Refugees
Identity, space and place in the Levant
Edited by
Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi
First published 2011
by Routledge
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© 2011 Editorial selection and matter Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi,
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
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from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Palestinian refugees: identity, space and place in the Levant / edited by Are
Knudsen and Sari Hanafi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Refugees, Palestinian Arab–Middle East. 2. Refugee camps. I. Knudsen,
Are J. II. Hanafi, Sari.
HV640.5.P36P36 2011
305.892’74056—dc22 2010019676
ISBN 0-203-83925-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN: 978–0–415–58046–5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978–0–203–83925–6 (ebk)
Contents
List of illustrations vii

Notes on contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii
List of abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
ARE KNUDSEN AND SARI HANAFI
PART I
Space, governance and locality 11
1 Cartographic violence, displacement and refugee camps: Palestine

and Iraq 13
JULIE PETEET
2 Governing the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria: the

cases of Nahr el-Bared and Yarmouk camps 29
SARI HANAFI
3 Palestinian camp refugee identifications: a new look at the ‘local’

and the ‘national’ 50
ROSEMARY SAYIGH
PART II
Urbanisation, place and politics 65
4 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon: migration, mobility and the

urbanization process 67
MOHAMED KAMEL DORAÏ
vi Contents
5 Refugees plan the future of Al Fawwar: piloting strategic camp
improvement in Palestine refugee camps 81
PHILIPP MISSELWITZ
6 Nahr el-Bared: the political fall-out of a refugee disaster 97

ARE KNUDSEN
PART III
Civic rights, legal status and reparations 111
7 Passport for what price? Statelessness among Palestinian refugees 113

ABBAS SHIBLAK
8 Dynamics of humanitarian aid, local and regional politics: the

Palestine refugees as a case-study 128
JALAL AL HUSSEINI AND RICCARDO BOCCO
9 Reparations to Palestinian refugees: the politics of saying ‘sorry’ 147

SHAHIRA SAMY
PART IV
Memory, agency and incorporation 163
10 ‘The one still surviving and viable institution’ 165

SYLVAIN PERDIGON
11 ‘A world of movement’: memory and reality for Palestinian women

in the camps of Lebanon 180
MARIA HOLT
12 Politics, patronage and Popular Committees in the Shatila refugee

camp, Lebanon 193
MANAL KORTAM
Bibliography 205
Index 224
Illustrations
Figures
10.1 Marriages between relatives in Abu ‘Ali’s family 171
10.2 Marriages between relatives in Emm Nasser’s family 175
10.3 Cousin marriages in Sma’in’s generation 176
Tables
I.1 Refugee distribution in the region as of 2009 3
2.1 Actors of the camp governance 31
2.2 Historical development of the actors of the camp governance 31
8.1 UNRWA registered refugees 129
8.2 Main advantage of registration with UNRWA 137
8.3 Main advantage of registration with UNRWA per place or residence 139
8.4 Refugees’ main problems per host country 141
Contributors
Jalal Al Husseini is an associate researcher at the French Institute of the Near East
(IFPO) (Amman). Holder of a PhD, with a thesis on the political dimensions of
humanitarian assistance in the Palestinian refugee case (Graduate Institute of
International Studies – Geneva), he is the author of several academic articles
and reports on Palestinian refugee and regional development issues. Al Husseini
is currently coordinating collective academic programmes: ‘The Palestinian
Diaspora Fifteen Years after Oslo: Palestinian Nation-building between State
Formation and Diasporic Processes’ (collective book to published in the second
quarter of 2010) and ‘The Concept of “Participation” in Development Programs’.
He has also consulted for local and international institutions, including the Swiss
Development and Cooperation Agency, the International Labour Organization,
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near
East (UNRWA) and the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services.
Riccardo Bocco received a PhD from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris,
and is presently Professor of Political Sociology at the Graduate Institute of
International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. Since the late 1990s,
his main research interest has been on the role of international aid organisa-
tions and the impact of their humanitarian and development programmes in
conflict and post-conflict contexts. Starting from the fall 2000 until late 2007
he headed a team (funded by several United Nations (UN) agencies) that has
monitored the evolution of the living conditions of the civilian population in
the Palestinian Territories. From 2004 to 2007 he also headed a joint research
project with UNRWA on the Palestinian refugees in the Near East. In 2009 he
edited a special issue of Refugee Survey Quarterly (Oxford University Press)
on ‘UNRWA and the Palestinian Refugees 60 years later’.
Sari Hanafi (editor) is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at the American
University of Beirut and editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic).
He is also a member of the Executive Bureau of the International Sociological
Association. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales – Paris. He has served as a visiting professor at the University
of Poitiers and Migrintern (France), University of Bologna and Ravenna (Italy)
and visiting fellow in CMI (Bergen, Norway). Hanafi was also the former
Contributors ix
director of the Palestinian Refugee and Diaspora Centre (Shaml) from 2000–4
and a former senior research at the Cairo-based French research centre. He is the
author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political and eco-
nomic sociology of the Palestinian diaspora and refugees; sociology of migration;
transnationalism; politics of scientific research; civil society and elite formation
and transitional justice. Among his recent books are: The Power of Inclusive
Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (co-
edited with A. Ophir and M. Givoni, 2009) (Zone Books) and The Emergence
of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and
Local NGOs (edited with L. Taber, 2005) (Arabic and English). In addition to
his academic work, he has served as a consultant to the UN, the World Bank
and other organisations.
Maria Holt is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of
Westminster in London. She received a PhD in politics from the University of
York in 2004 and has written extensively on the experiences of Muslim women
in situations of violent conflict, gendered aspects of the Palestinian–Israeli con-
flict and the impact of Islamist movements on Arab women. In 2006–7, she
conducted an ethnographic study of Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon
in terms of memory, identity and change. The results of her recent project, an
oral history of the final years of British colonial rule in southern Yemen, were
published in 2006. She is currently working on a book on women and Islamic
resistance in the Arab world.
Mohamed Kamel Doraï is a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific
Research (CNRS) currently based at the IFPO in Damascus and a visiting
researcher at Migrinter, University of Poitiers (France). His work focuses mainly
on asylum and refugees in the Middle East, new migrations and geopolitical
reorganisation in the Middle East, and migration and transnational practices
within the Palestinian diaspora. Kamel Doraï is currently conducting research on
the Iraqis in Syria as well as on the urbanisation process of Palestinian refugee
camps in Lebanon. The comparative study between refugees residing in and
out of camps as well as the analysis of their migratory experience and spatial
practices provide an account of the refugees’ socio-spatial dynamics in exile
and of relations between the camp and their urban environment.
Are Knudsen (editor) is a senior researcher the CMI and holds a PhD in social
anthropology from the University of Bergen (2001). Knudsen is scientific coordi-
nator for CMI’s research collaboration with the Palestinian Institute for the Study
of Democracy (Muwatin) and co-director of an institute programme on forced
migration. Knudsen has done fieldwork in Lebanon, Pakistan and Palestine.
He has published on Islamism among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, polit-
ical Islam in Palestine and political violence in post-civil war Lebanon. With
Palestinian collaborators he has co-directed a documentary film, Nahr el-Bared
Talks Back (2010). Knudsen is currently engaged in several research projects in
Lebanon on forced migration, impunity and peacekeeping.
x Contributors
Manal Kortam has been a youth program coordinator since September 2009 at
Norwegian People’s Aid, Lebanon, a humanitarian organisation working in more
than 30 countries. In her work, she focuses on empowering Palestinian youth
to have influence over their own lives and she encourages youth initiatives in
the development process of their communities. Prior to her current position, she
worked for three years as a programme assistant at the Welfare Association in
Lebanon, a Palestinian development non-governmental organisation (NGO).
Kortam graduated from El Manar University in Tunisia with a degree in inter-
national law and political science in 2003 and her Master’s from Saint Joseph
University in 2007 focused on analysing the various aspects of Palestinian life
in Lebanon including the role of camp actors (NGOs, UNRWA officers, popular
committees) in governance.
Philipp Misselwitz is a professor of International Urbanism at the University
of Stuttgart, Germany. He was educated at Cambridge University and the
Architecture Association London and received a PhD in architecture and urb-
anism at Stuttgart University. Previous teaching commitments included London
Metropolitan University and University of the Arts Berlin. He is a founding mem-
ber of the Berlin-based architectural research group ‘Urban Catalyst’ – a platform
for research activities, exhibitions, publications and debates (www.urbancata-
lyst.net). Since 2005 he has worked as a researcher at Stuttgart University’s
Department for Urbanism in Asia, Africa and Latin America (SIAAL) and was
appointed project manager of the ‘Camp Development Pilot Research Project’,
an UNRWA–SIAAL cooperation project (2006–8). On behalf of the German
Technical Cooperation (GTZ) he has worked as a project coordinator for stra-
tegic support measures for UNRWA’s Camp Improvement Programme in Syria,
Jordan and West Bank since 2008.
Sylvain Perdigon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore. His current research examines the ethics and
politics of kin relatedness in the Palestinian refugee camps of Tyre, Lebanon,
where he lived for two years in 2006–8 and returns regularly. He was born in
Saint-Etienne, France, and studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Ecoles
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
Julie Peteet is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Director
of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Louisville. Her research
has focused on Palestinian displacement, refugee camps, space and identity, and
more recently the policy of closure in the West Bank. She has authored two books:
Gender in Crisis; Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (Columbia
University Press, 1991) and Landscape of Hope and Despair. Palestinian Refugee
Camps (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). She has published in a vari-
ety of journals including Signs, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology,
Cultural Survival, International Journal of Middle East Studies and Middle
East Report as well as contributed numerous chapters to edited volumes. Her
research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren,
Contributors xi
Fulbright, the Mellon Foundation, the Council of American Overseas Research
Centers, and the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC). She serves on
the Editorial Board of the Middle East Research and Information Project, is
a board member of PARC and was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of
Women and Islamic Cultures.
Shahira Samy is Jarvis Doctorow Junior Research Fellow in international relations
and conflict resolution in the Middle East at St Edmund Hall and the Department
of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She is the author
of Reparations to Palestinian Refugees: A Comparative Perspective (Routledge,
2010). Samy’s research interests focus on post-conflict reparations as well as
the politics of displacement in the Middle East. She has authored a number of
studies and acted as a consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR), Adam Smith International, the CARIM Network at the
European University Institute in Florence and the Euro-Mediterranean Human
Rights Network (EMHRN). Prior to her current position at Oxford, Samy spent
a year as a lecturer at the British University in Egypt upon receiving her PhD
from the University of Exeter in 2006. In her earlier career, Samy was a refugee
status determination officer at UNHCR Cairo, a journalist with Egypt’s Al-Ahram
Weekly and a teaching assistant at Alexandria University.
Rosemary Sayigh is an anthropologist and oral historian living in Beirut, Lebanon,
specialising in Palestinian refugee studies. She is the author of The Palestinians:
From Peasants to Revolutionaries (Zed Books, 1979); Too Many Enemies: The
Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (Zed Books, 1994); and Voices: Palestinian
Women Narrate Displacement (http://almashriq.hiof.no/voices/).
Abbas Shiblak is a writer and academic. For the last few years, he has focused on
issues of migration, displacement and statelessness. He is a founder and the first
director of Palestinian Refugee and Diaspora Centre (Shaml) in Ramallah. His
latest publications include: a new edition of his book on the Iraqi Jewish commu-
nity exodus, the Palestinian Communities in Europe; Challenges of Adaptation
and Identity, various articles on the issue of statelessness in the Arab regions
and a briefing paper on the Palestinian refugees and the political settlement in
the Middle East (Royal Institute of International Affairs/Chatham House, 2009).
Shiblak read law and sociology in Egypt and in the UK. He is currently Research
Fellow at the International Development Centre, University of Oxford.
Acknowledgements
The papers in this volume were originally delivered at the workshop ‘From Exodus
to Exile: Palestinian Lives in the Levant’ (Bergen, September 2007). The workshop
and the preparation of this volume is the result of a long and productive research co-
operation between the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and the Palestinian Institute
for the Study of Democracy (Muwatin) funded by the Norwegian Agency for
Development Cooperation (Norad). This volume follows on previous publications
stemming from this co-operation over the past decade (Hilal 2007; Lønning and
Giacaman 1998; Khan et al. 2004).
We wish to thank the scholars that took part in the workshop for their contribution
and patience during the lengthy review process. We are especially grateful to the
members of the organisation committee, May Jayyusi and Jaber Suleiman, whose
commitment to the workshop was crucial to its success. We would also like to thank
Hilde Kjøstvedt who helped organise the workshop, Kari Heggstad who assisted
with the editorial work and Inger Nygaard who finalised the manuscript. Our final
words of gratitude go to our families for their support and patience.
Are Knudsen, Bergen

Sari Hanafi, Beirut
Abbreviations
ACOR American Center for Oriental Research

CBO community-based organization
CCP Committee of the Camp’s Population
DFLP Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
DOP Declaration of Principles
DRA Directorate of Refugee Affairs
FRC Follow-up and Reform Committee
GAPAR General Authority for Palestine Arab Refugee Affairs
GAP Government of All Palestine
GUPW General Union of Palestine Workers
IDP internally displaced person
IOM International Organization for Migration
ISF Internal Security Forces (Lebanon)
IUED Graduate Institute of Development Studies (Geneva University)
LAF Lebanese Armed Forces
LAS League of Arab States
LPDC Lebanese–Palestinian Dialogue Committee
NA National Authority
NBC Nahr el-Bared camp
NEP Near East Project
NGO non-governmental organisation
OPT Occupied Palestinian Territories
PA Palestinian Authority
PARI Palestine Arab Refugee Institution
PCBS Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics
PFLP-GC Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command
PHRO Palestinian Human Rights Organization
PIP Peace Implementation Program
PLO Palestine Liberation Organization
PNA Palestinian National Authority
PNC Palestinian National Council
PRCS Palestine Red Crescent Society
PRM Palestinian Revolutionary Movement
xiv Abbreviations
RR registered refugee
RRC registered refugee in camp
RWG Refugee Working Group
Shahed Palestinian Association for Human Rights
SSN Social Safety Net (UNRWA program)
TD travel document
UN United Nations
UNCCP United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNGA United Nations General Assembly
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNRWA United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the
Near East
YAC Youth Action Committee
Introduction
Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi
In 2010, it was 64 years since the refugees’ fateful exodus from Palestine (al-Nakba,
‘disaster’) and the birth of the refugee problem. The refugee problem has since
remained unsolved despite United Nations (UN) General Assembly resolutions
demanding their return. Despite six decades of continued struggle for their rights,
the bitter fact is that refugees have neither been able to return to their homeland
nor obtain basic civil rights in some host states. Today, there are about four million
Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. A large number of the refugees, especially
camp dwellers, suffer from poverty, lack of civil rights and live in the midst of
intense social and political conflict. In the longest-standing refugee problem in
modern history, refugees are caught between exile and alienation as non-citizens
of host states. By advancing a regional approach to contemporary refugee com-
munities, this book highlights the diversity of Palestinian lives across the Levant
and examines its causes.
The book’s main aim is to turn the attention – although not completely – from the
past (the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem) and the future (possible solutions
to the Palestinian refugee problem, directions for a peace process) to the present. It
is about the Palestinian living conditions, modes of governance of refugee camps,
camp reconstruction and improvement, humanitarian management and refugee cri-
sis. If history enters the analytic frame that this book offers, it does so only by way
of the genealogies of the spaces and institutions; if the future is projected here it is
only through the foreseeable effect of the present situation. A relentless stream of
books project the present devastation into an indeterminate future of what appears
to be an apocalyptic situation – refugees as destabilising forces, humanitarian cri-
ses, camps as laboratories of a full range of political Islamism. At the same time
many of them read a speculative future (return as the only option) into the present,
as if it has been agreed upon and hence become a historical necessity, something
that would happen inevitably. Pierre Bourdieu has made a poignant commentary
on such kind of illusions:
One discovers how the powerlessness that, by destroying potentialities, pre-

vents investment in social stakes engenders illusions. The link between the
present and the future seems to be broken, as is shown by the projects they
2 Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi
[unemployed migrants in France] entertain, completely detached from the
present and immediately belied by it.
(Bourdieu 2000: 221–2)
Palestinian refugees: regional overview

The social, economic and demographic situation for refugees varies across the
Levantine host countries (Table I.1). From a legal point of view Lebanon only hosts
refugees who in legal terms are labelled ‘stateless foreigners’, but admits no respon-
sibility for them (Haddad 2003). This responsibility rests with the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA),
which is responsible for providing adequate housing and living conditions for the
refugees. Of the about 425,000 registered refugees in Lebanon about half live in
UNRWA camps and ‘informal’ camps. The refugees living in one of the 12 ‘official’
camps run by UNRWA are provided with a meagre package of services and welfare
benefits (schooling, medical care etc.), which are insufficient in relation to their
present needs (Abbas et al. 1997). The most comprehensive study of present living
conditions among camp-dwelling Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to date finds
that the refugees suffer from widespread unemployment, poor living conditions,
ill health, low education levels and rising illiteracy (Ugland 2003).
Lebanon has the highest percentage of camp-dwelling refugees (51 per cent) of all
the countries hosting Palestinian refugees. Lebanon also has the highest percentage
of refugees who are living in abject poverty and who are registered with UNRWA’s
‘special hardship’ programme. In general, one-third of the camp-based refugees
in Lebanon are considered poor. This is a result of stringent policy measures in
Lebanon designed to keep the refugees trapped inside cramped and squalid camps
and shanty towns from which there is no escape – except by leaving the country. This
is one reason why the actual number of refugees living in the country is believed to
be only half of the official figure (see Table I.1). The most extreme measure used
to discriminate against Palestinians is preventing them from holding jobs, owning
property and seeking higher education. Palestinians are barred from entering more
than 70 high and low status professions so that they have come to form a permanent
underclass. Subject to severe social exclusion (Halabi 2004), the refugees’ main
concern has been preserving their refugee identity (Khalili 2004).
Jordan is the only Arab country that historically gave citizenship rights to
Palestinian refugees and the percentage of camp-based refugees is much lower
in Jordan (30 per cent) than in Lebanon (51 per cent). In Syria there are about
450,000 Palestinian refugees and about one-fourth live in camps administered by
UNRWA and about 100,000 live in unofficial camps (see Table I.1). The refugees
have the right to work and receive social benefits but cannot vote in elections
(Blome-Jacobsen 2003). Hence, in Syria the refugees’ situation is a mixture of
that in Lebanon (no civil and political rights) and Jordan (full civil and political
rights). Nonetheless, they share the misery equally with the Syrian citizens and
about one-fourth of the refugees in Syria lives below the official poverty line and
a further 22 per cent is on the poverty line (RSC 2001: 10).
Introduction 3
Table I.1 Refugee distribution in the region as of 2009
Registered refugees Registered refugees
Field of operations Official camps (in camps) (total)
Jordan 10 338,000 1,951,603

Lebanon 12 222,776 422,188**
Syria 9 125,009* 461,897
West Bank 19 193,370 762,820
Gaza Strip 8 495,006 1,073,303
Agency total 58 1,374,161 4,671,811
Source: UNRWA (www.unrwa.org).

Notes
* The figure does not include the refugees living in Yarmouk camp, Damascus, an unofficial camp
(pop. 100,000).
** The number of effective dwellers has been estimated at 275,000.
According to the 2007’s census, the West Bank had a population of about
2.35 million, about one-fourth of them were refugees registered with the UNRWA,
a significant section of them camp-based (180,000) (Table I.1). In the Gaza Strip,
the total population is 1.42 million. The UNRWA refugee population is about
one million and about half of these are camp-based. The refugees registered with
UNRWA include those internally displaced in the 1948 and 1967 wars and their
descendants. They are provided with a meagre package of services and welfare
benefits (schooling, medical care etc.), which are insufficient in relation to their
present needs. Nonetheless, there is almost universal school attendance and high
literacy rates among the young generations (below 35 years), especially for the
UNRWA refugees, whose refugee status entitles them to free primary education
(Pedersen et al. 2001).
In the Palestinian territories two-thirds of all Palestinians are below the poverty
line, and power-stricken families survive on a mix of informal assistance (remit-
tances, local credit facilities and religious charity, zakat) and formal help (food aid,
cash assistance, donations), administered by UNRWA (refugees), Palestinian NGOs
and the Ministry of Social Affairs (Knudsen 2005a). Typically, the impoverished
families endure cramped housing in large conjugal families with many dependants
and few breadwinners, which translates into a very high ‘dependency ratio’.
Refugee crises in the region

Since their independence, the Arab states have been governed by emergency laws
instituting a permanent ‘state of exception’. The particular form of state forma-
tion in this region has produced different forms of citizenship, refugee-hood and
statelessness. Cases of severe poverty coupled with recurring outbursts of state
repression, conflict and displacement, and spaces of exception (as detention camps
of Iraqi refugees and Palestinian refugee camps dated since 1948), have sparked
local insurgencies and resistance to foreign intervention. Despite their substantial
divergences along a continuum, they exhibit different points along the passage
from the ‘rule of law’ to the ‘law of rules’.
Historically, colonial, regional and ethnic conflicts in the Middle East have had
serious consequences for generating internally displaced persons (IDPs), migrants
and refugees. The borders between Arab states were historically porous so that
refugees were able to move across them quite easily. Waves of refugees were
received as temporary residents and managed through a discretionary toleration
regime: 800,000 Palestinians, one million Iraqis in the 1990s and another 2.4 million
Iraqis since 2003, as well as one million of Sudanese since the 1990s. As Mundt
and Ferris has observed:
With a few exceptions, such as Afghanistan in the 1980s and Burundi, con-
temporary conflicts tend to generate more IDPs than refugees. Thus Sudan
has 4.7 million IDPs and ‘only’ 686,000 refugees while Turkey has between
954,000 and 1.2 million IDPs but ‘only’ 227,232 refugees.
(Mundt and Ferris 2008: 2)
The ongoing refugee and IDP-crisis is still disproportionally burdening the devel-
oping countries as two-thirds of all refugees are hosted by them. Additionally,
four Arab host countries (Iraq, Jordan, Sudan and Syria) have the highest ratio of
refugees as compared to the total population. Within this region, three trends of
refugee flows are discernible: refugees in emergency, refugees in transit and pro-
tracted refugees. Almost all the Palestinian refugees fall into the latter category. In
the Middle East region, protracted refugees are often without civil rights and thus
raise major social and political challenges. The World Refugee Survey has termed
this group ‘warehoused’ refugees:
Warehousing is the practice of keeping refugees in protracted situations of

restricted mobility, enforced idleness, and dependency – their lives on indefinite
hold – in violation of their basic rights under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.
Egregious cases are characterized by indefinite physical confinement in camps.
Encamped or not, refugees are warehoused when they are deprived of the
freedom necessary to pursue normal lives.
(Smith 2004: 38)
This reflects Michel Agier’s assertion that ‘the camp formula’ has been instituted
for the ‘humanitarian management of the most unthinkable and undesirable popu-
lations on the planet’ (Agier 2007: 320). The camps represent a new socio-spatial
form that is unique in its composition to become humanitarian sanctuaries devoid
of meaning hence they can be considered ‘non-places’ (Agier 2002: 323; see also
Augé 1995). Of the more than 8.5 million warehoused refugees worldwide (as of
31 December 2007), more than 3.7 million currently reside in or originated from
Introduction 5
the Arab region. Warehousing refuges is therefore particularly salient in the context
of the Arab region. Indeed, the Palestinian refugees represent the largest and most
protracted refugee problem in the world (UNHCR 2006: 112). This is one reason
why many of the contributions to this volume focus on refugee camps as the major
space where warehoused refugees live.
Internationally, protracted refugee situations can represent a security challenge
to host states as camps become militarised and engender conflict (Lischer 2005).
However, the stability of the Arab states remains jeopardised, not by the massive
presence of refugees in the region, but by the way that host states have treated them.
The work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2005; 1998) throws light on
the way in which the state, the ‘sovereign’ in Agamben’s terminology, institutes a
‘state of exception’ by which the provisions of the constitution are either undermined
or suspended. Over time, the temporary suspension becomes a permanent spatial
arrangement of domination (Lentin 2008). The exception is thus becoming the rule,
and, consequently, the refugee populations’ ontological status as legal subjects is
suspended indefinitely. The sovereign has the capacity to transform whole sections
of the refugee population into stateless persons. To give some recent examples,
there is the denaturalisation decree that affected more than two million Palestinians
living in the West Bank who were carrying Jordanian passports (1992), the massive
expulsion of Palestinian refugees from Libya (1997) and Iraq (2005–6), and the
absence of civil and socio-economic rights of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are
examples of the use of exception by a sovereign to suspend the citizenship status of
undesirable parts of the populace. A ‘state of exception’ is hence instituted either by
decree or through executive power. Egypt, for example, under certain conditions,
grants children born to stateless parents Egyptian citizenship, but if the father is a
stateless Palestinian, his children are excluded. In Lebanon, the authorities issued
an amendment to the nationality law and conferred citizenship onto 100,000 state-
less residents (termed ‘foreigners’), yet Palestinians were by-and-large excluded
from this scheme (Knudsen 2009).
The classical order of nation-state has thus developed rights for citizens but
not for human beings. As Hannah Arendt noted as early as the beginning of the
1950s, there is no place for the human being outside the nation-state (Arendt 1985).
There are citizens’ rights but not human rights. In liberal democracies, civil rights
are linked to permanent residency. However, in Arab countries nationality is the
key to obtaining civil rights. The right to citizenship in these countries serves as a
primary right from which other civil rights and entitlements are derived. To have
civil rights, you must first be a citizen. The refugees and the stateless do not have
rights to have a right, to paraphrase Arendt, but only ‘benefits’ derived from their
ontological status as dependent on the disciplinary apparatuses of the police and
security forces. This issue is not confined to the Middle East. More and more refu-
gees are excluded from legal protection in European countries, but are, however,
subject to their bureaucratic power (Salih 2008). There, refugees remain vulnerable
even after acquiring nationality. Any criminal or other questionable activity puts
them at risk of being deprived of citizenship and forcibly returned to their country
of origin.
Refugee studies: situating this book
A significant part of the English-language literature on Palestinian refugees reflect
the misfortunes that have marked the history of Palestine and Palestinians, thus
scholarship has emphasised suffering (Sayigh 1994), tragedy and injustice (Al-Hout
2004), themes that find their historical roots in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine
(Pappe 2006) and subsequent refugee disaster of the Nakba (Abu-Lughod and Sa’di
2007). By contrast, more recent scholarship departs from this research agenda and
portrays refugee camps as breeding grounds for religious extremism and militancy
(Rougier 2007). This notwithstanding, the field of ‘refugee studies’ (Malkki 1995b)
is centrally concerned with legal issues (Takkenberg 1998), forced displacement
(Grabska and Mehta 2008), repatriation (Brynen and El-Rifai 2007; Dumper 2006),
and, above all, the ‘right of return’ to Palestine (Aruri 2001). There are also sig-
nificant country specific studies of camp-based refugees in Lebanon (Peteet 2005),
West Bank and Gaza (Lybarger 2007) and in the diaspora communities more gener-
ally (Schulz and Hammer 2003; Hanafi 2001, 2005). Recent studies also focus on
host-country views of refugees (Haddad 2003) as well as the mythology of refugee
status for the preservation of refugee identity and uniqueness (Bowker 2003).
This book engages with the above body of scholarship on refugees, but crucially
also opens up new avenues for research while challenging old ones. The first part
of this book (Space, governance and locality) opens up a critical debate on key
conceptual dimensions, unpacking the new terminology on refugees, migration
and diaspora studies. Julie Peteet’s contribution explores the intersection between
ethnic and sectarian imaginaries of the Middle East and contemporary displace-
ments in Palestine and Iraq. Peteet’s eloquent inquiry analyses the reconfiguration
of humanitarian space and the new spatial forms of containment that produce and
reproduce identity and shape resistance to displacement. Now a new discourse
of ‘catch-basins’ and ‘collection points’ accompanies the absence of new refugee
camps in the Middle East region. In lieu of refugee camps, new techniques of
displacement and humanitarian spaces are being created that serve to eviscerate
the refugee crisis in the region.
Following on to the issues raised by Peteet, Sari Hanafi seeks a new understand-
ing of the spatial and political dimensions governing refugee camps. Examining
refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, he argues that the camp’s governance struc-
tures must be re-examined, not from a security perspective, but from the angle of
segregation. Segregation becomes the central concept in debates about the spatial
concentration of social risk and about urban/local governance. While Syria has
treated camps as any residential area, in Lebanon refugee camps are perceived as
‘security islands’, and treated as ‘spaces of exception’ that turn them into laborat-
ories of control and surveillance. This has prevented camp-based Palestinians in
Lebanon from establishing effective governance structures. In this near-absence
of conventional governance, alternative governmentalities have emerged among
camp populations, which to a remarkable degree, have succeeded in regulating the
camp residents’ behaviour. The issue of space and identity is explored further in
Rosemary Sayigh’s thoughtful contribution which analyses refugee camp identity
Introduction 7
using siege narratives from Jenin and Shatila. Sayigh shows how the narratives
have been shaped by the multiplicity of political environments in which diasporic
peoples live. She argues that camp dwellers share a distinct sense of ‘being-as-a-
group’, based on similar conditions of oppression, marginalisation and poverty.
She calls for a more authentic representation of the Palestinian public that allows
for studying the political role the ‘local’ in a time of national crisis. As Sayigh’s
contribution points out, the spatial form impacts on identity and is undergoing
rapid change.
The study of refugee camps have tended to take the camp setting as being static,
while the camps have a dynamic relation with their urban environment. This topic is
explored in more detail in the next section (Urbanisation, place and politics) where
the urbanisation process and the creation of city-camps or camp-cities changes the
environment adjacent to refugee camps and the built environment within the camps.
In the first instance, Mohamed Kamel Doraï’s contribution examines the urbani-
sation of refugee camps in Beirut which, although marginalised and segregated,
are still interconnected with the urban environment through the different forms of
spatial and economic mobility. This, in combination with the growing presence of
other groups of refugees and the new commercial activities blur the boundaries
of the refugee camps, making them a part of the city in the sense of becoming
‘city-camps’ (camp villes).
Moving the debate of urbanisation from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’, Philipp
Misselwitz examines the lessons from a participatory intervention project seeking
to redefine the built environment in the West Bank refugee camp of Fawwar. Over
several decades, the unplanned transformation of the built environment has given
rise to complex and ambiguous ‘urbanised camps’ (‘Camp Cities’) that are both
congested and slum-like, yet have commercial centres, market and neighbourhoods.
The participatory camp-improvement process was both difficult and conflictual but
helped redefine the residents’ relationship with UNRWA and externally imposed
aid programmes in favour of a more participatory decision-making process.
The final contribution to this section deals with the physical devastation of a
refugee camp and its political implications. In this chapter Are Knudsen analyses
the political fall-out of the destruction of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in 2007
for redefining the political relations between refugees, their political representatives
and the state. He shows how the political fall-out of the crisis entrenched the dichot-
omisation of the political landscape in Lebanon and produced two opposing ways
of understanding the disaster and how to resolve it. Knudsen argues that the Nahr
el-Bared disaster was exploited for political gain. This is because the Palestinian
problem (aka, ‘refugee file’) is a sensitive political issue and being able to control
the national dialogue on this issue is a political asset. These benefits are largest in
Sunni-majority cities where the Palestinian-issue speaks to the Sunni ‘street’ and
being perceived to control the ‘refugee file’ is a tactical advantage.
The question of civil rights, citizenship and statelessness is crucial to understand
contemporary refugee livelihoods. In general, the lives of Palestinian refugees are
circumscribed by legal barriers that purposely exclude them from the benefits of
citizenship and render them stateless. The problem of statelessness is one of the
most critical problems facing refugees and in the following section (Civil rights,
legal status and reparations), Abbas Shiblak examines the impact of statelessness
on the Palestinian refugees, their experiences, livelihood and mobility within the
region and beyond. It examines the shifting concepts of citizenship in the Palestinian
political discourse as well as among the refugees themselves. Shiblak offers a critical
analysis of various formats that citizenship has been used by the concerned parties
to determine the destiny of ordinary Palestinians and influence the resolution of
the refugee question. He finds that statelessness has had a profound effect on the
mobility, welfare and livelihoods of refugees and prevented them from sustaining
themselves.
Moving the debate on civil rights to a regional-level comparison gives new
insights into the perceived benefits of refugee status for the problem of statelessness
and the lack of legal protection for refugees. Jalal Al Husseini and Riccardo Bocco
explore how the legal status conferred by the Arab host countries has impacted on
the Palestinian refugees. More specifically, their careful analyses of survey data
from the five areas under UNRWA-mandate (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank) examine how the refugees legal status has ‘structured’
them as a community, and, conversely, how the refugees perceive their situation
as exiles in these countries. They find that there is widespread dissatisfaction with
UNRWA’s services, severe criticism of host countries’ denial of civil rights and
that a unilateral reappraisal of the refugees’ ‘right of return’ could be potentially
destabilising.
The right of return is, in particular in the Palestinian context, considered a sacred,
inalienable right. One reason why the questions of compensation and reparations
are so sensitive is because they are seen as undermining the right of return. In
the final contribution to this section, Shahira Samy examines novel approaches
to compensation, reparations and formal apology stemming from the transitional
justice discipline. She provides an overview of the international practice regarding
the use of compensation and apology and examines the question of reparations to
displaced refugees, in particular the many solutions for implementing the right of
return, resettlement, restitution of property and compensation. Without prejudicing
either of these key rights, she calls for a wider approach to reparations, in par-
ticular the importance of a formal ‘apology’ that acknowledges responsibility for
past wrongdoing(s) as a integral part of redressing the historical injustice against
displaced Palestinian refugees.
Prolonged exile gives rise to new social and cultural practices such as the
importance of memory, the re-conceptualisation of the family and new subjective
identities. These topics are explored in the next section (Memory, agency and incor-
poration), which looks at the ways refugees have adapted to prolonged exile and
‘warehousing’ by redefining the meaning of kinship, family structure and gendered
narratives. In the first part, Sylvain Perdigon examines the intersection between
refugee status, kinship and marriage strategies among camp-based Palestinians in
Tyr. Through a detailed examination of the refugees’ narratives and life histories,
Perdigon’s sensitive ethnographic study captures the individual and familial mar-
riage strategies employed to cope with and ultimately overcome the many social,
Introduction 9
political and legal barriers facing camp-based refugees. As Perdigon shows, the
refugees creatively redefine kinship and kinship obligations so as to create a mixture
of ‘familyscapes’ that in their dynamism bear testimony to the refugees’ agency.
This, argues Perdigon, makes the Agambian notion of ‘a space of exception’ deeply
problematic as the camp has created an exceptionally rich tapestry of strategies to
resolve the challenges of prolonged exile.
This theme is explored further in the next contribution where Maria Holt moves
the debate into the realm of refugee women’s agency. Her contribution is a finely
tuned analysis of women’s narratives for the construction of place and the uses of
memory by women seeking to escape the hopelessness of the present. Holt argues
that the Palestinian ‘victim diaspora’ has developed a particular kind of identity that
is both generational and gendered. A key to women’s identity formation is female
story telling, which by ‘gendering the past’ embraces the memory of other times and
places as sources of comfort and protection denied to them in the context of chronic
insecurity, hence this can be considered a communal narrative of survival.
Ending this section, Manal Kortam analyses the role of the local actors in the
incorporation process in the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Kortam provides
an interesting case study of self-organising whereby the residents set up a commit-
tee to improve the dismal living conditions in the camp and set up a democratic
leadership elected by popular vote. Kortam describes how this popular reform
movement collapsed when faced with threats from the camp’s traditional power
holders. More generally, this case study shows the problem of challenging tradi-
tional modes of governance in refugee camps, which despite their appealing name
(‘Popular Committees’) neither represent popular vote nor popular sentiments but
are vested power bases of non-local political patrons.
Part I
Space, governance and
locality
1 Cartographic violence,
displacement and refugee
camps
Palestine and Iraq
Julie Peteet
Introduction
Mass displacements, with their attendant traumas, and the politics of mobility
and immobility, are dual instances of the cartographic violence that has unfolded
in the Middle East over the past century. They point to an implicit and, at times,
explicit vision of the region in which imagined ethnic-sectarian, and perhaps tribal,
affiliations and identities are isomorphic with particular spaces. On the ground,
this suggests that while the formula associating space, territories, identities, and
cultures has come un-done in anthropological thinking, it is alive and well and
indeed is a conscious political project. Invasions and occupations with their projects
of dismantlement are attempts to re-write local and regional geographies, craft new
ethnic-sectarian and national spaces, impose external dominance, and squash the
idea of resistance. These projects are well underway in Iraq and Palestine, each
with its local variant and particular forms of violence. In both projects, territorial
impulses and sentiments have engendered large numbers of displaced people. They
are the human side of imposing imagined spaces, boundaries, and social entities.
Indeed, in both cases, one can speak of a humanitarian disaster.
This chapter is an initial exploration of the intersection of ethnic-sectarian projects
and imaginaries, the production of displacement, and spatial devices of containment.
In Iraq, the concepts of sect, ethnicity, and tribe were mobilized by the occupying
US forces as fairly self-evident, socially coherent entities with little regard for their
historically and situationally fluid and contingent character. Usually refugees take
flight or are expelled and subsequently prevented from returning because they do
not fit the national boundaries of inclusion. Mass refugee flows are also produced
as people flee the break-up of a state and its fragmentation into ethnic-sectarian
or national entities. These displacements are diagnostic of who is included in the
political body and who is outside and the re-arrangement of space and habitation.
In other words, these on-going displacements are a lens through which to track
imaginaries about places, social entities, and belonging in the region. In the case
of Iraq, displacement seems to be part of reconfiguring the state and the notion
of Iraq; in the case of Palestine it involves thinning the population, obstructing
statehood, and accommodating an expansive state. The current nearly unparalleled
14 Julie Peteet
refugee flow in the region is occurring at a time when the internationally recognized
category of refugee is ‘shrinking’ (Zetter 2007).
L. Malkki turned to Mary Douglas’ work on human classification, particularly
‘matter-out-of-place’, at the level of state, citizenship, and categories of belonging
(Douglas 1966; Malkki 1995a: 7–8). The refugee both emerges from the violence
entailed in the process of manufacturing and assigning space and belonging and rep-
resents a refusal of categorization and its spatial articulation. Malkki distinguishes
between matter-out-of-place in the natural and human worlds: ‘people categorize
back’. It is imperative that we ask about Iraq’s minorities – the Mandeans, the
Yazidis, and the various Christian communities among others – what is happen-
ing to them and where do they fit or not fit in the new Iraq? A critical arena for
further investigation is the production of knowledge on Iraq. What body of texts
is referenced in US policy and planning? Ethnographic work with Iraqi refugees
could help to clarify the decision-making process about departure and sentiments
about ‘primordial’ identities and affiliations.
The Middle East has long been a major producer of refugees.1 By the beginning
of 2007, the Middle East was generating 5,931,000 refugees out of a world total
of 13,948,800 (World Refugee Survey 2007). It also has the distinction of being
home to one of the most protracted refugee crises, the Palestinian crisis. In this
region, refugees have left indelible marks, radically transforming urban space and
politics, and notions of citizenship and categories of belonging.
Some states have complex histories of generating substantial waves of refugees
or being built by the displaced. The Greek–Turkish population ‘exchange’ and the
Armenian massacres and expulsions mark the beginning decades of the last cen-
tury. Israel’s establishment in 1948 resulted in over 750,000 Palestinian refugees
and the constitution of Israel as Jewish state. Jordan, for example, has been host
to multiple influxes of the displaced from the late nineteenth-century Circassians
to Palestinian refugees in 1948, 1967, 1991, and more recently an estimated one
million Iraqis. Jordan has an admirable history of refugee assistance. During the
Algerian war of independence over two million were forcibly displaced by the
French. In Lebanon, the civil war and periodic Israeli invasions over the past
several decades generated hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons
(IDPs). Partition along sectarian lines was a prominent theme coursing through the
civil war.
In the past few decades, Iraq has hardly been a stranger to forced displacement.
Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled the violence and turmoil of the Iran–Iraq
war, the Gulf war, and murderous campaigns against them by the Iraqi state. In
an attempt at demographic engineering, the Baathist regime destroyed thousands
of Kurdish villages and expelled Kurds from the North. They then moved Arabs
into Kurdish regions where these Arabs are themselves now facing pressure to
leave. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled the country in the past two decades to
escape wars, sanctions, and state-perpetrated violence. However, the US occupa-
tion and its precipitation of a cycle of sectarian and ethnic violence have given
rise to unprecedented mass displacement with discernable sectarian dimensions,
particularly among the IDPs.
Cartographic violence, displacement and refugee camps 15
What is novel in this contemporary period of mass displacement and re-
landscaping is the discursive, the spatial, and the classificatory and organizational:
the silence about the Iraqi displaced and their non-categorization as refugees, the
absence of refugee camps and minimal humanitarian assistance, and the simul-
taneous imputation and crystallization of sectarian and tribal affiliations, spaces,
leadership, and identities. On the Palestinian side, there is silence about the con-
finement and immobility of Palestinians under the Israeli policy of closure and the
economic devastation this has wrought, which is intended to propel a dilution of the
population and thus facilitate the expansion of the state’s borders and sovereignty.
What is constant in this period is the imagined and actual ‘enclavization’ of the
region along ethnic, national, and sectarian lines and the silence about the ‘inequal-
ities and costs’ that Lutz notes often accompany empire (Lutz 2006: 594).
This chapter begins by exploring the current Iraqi refugee crisis then turns to the
question of Palestine in search of intersections and emerging regional dimensions
of displacement. The current Iraqi displacement crisis and the slowness to compel a
significant international response may presage a re-conceptualization of the concept
of the refugee, the spatial and administrative device of the camp, and humanitarian
responses to large-scale emergencies. Recent attempts to geo-politically re-map the
region and craft new political spaces has turned Iraq into a killing field of terrifying
magnitude and has generated unprecedented displacement. Likewise, the Israeli
policy of closure of the occupied territories, which severely obstructs Palestinian
mobility, and its deleterious effects on the economy, health care and education may
mark the final stage in the colonization of Palestine.
Enclaves and exclaves

Often repeated but still worth noting here is that Iraqis constitute the largest wave
of displaced people since the Palestinian refugee crisis began in 1948. In the frag-
mentation of Palestine and Iraq, a sectarian sorting out and an assignment of space,
mobility, and rights are discernable. In this emerging new geography, control of
resources, underground (oil and water) and above-ground surfaces (space for mil-
itary bases, colonies, and control of the skies, waterways, and borders) has been
critical for the occupying authorities’ inscription of power. Most significantly, both
the Israeli state and the US occupation of Iraq have produced staggering numbers
of displaced who are marginalized – if not indeed largely invisible – in the narra-
tives of these conflicts outside the region. Underwriting both projects is a vision
of national and ethnic-sectarian space. The twentieth-century notion of a ‘state
for everyone and everyone in a state’ (Aleinikoff 1995: 257) is being violently
re-written in Iraq and Palestine as ‘everyone in his/her enclave and an enclave for
everyone’. The imaginary Middle East mosaic in which ethnic and sectarian groups
are assigned to particular spaces and conceptualized as bounded, coherent, nearly
corporate groups harkens back to Orientalist and early anthropological elaborations
(see Patai 2007) of the region and a Zionism that turns away from co-existence
in a plural social order in favor of segregation and demographic superiority (see
Soffer 2002). In both Iraq and Palestine, forced separation enacted through the
16 Julie Peteet
violence of ethnic-sectarian cleansing and displacement, the erection of physical
barriers to mobility and interaction, and enforced immobility are giving material
form to these imaginary spaces. Sect, ethnicity, and tribe are not preordained cat-
egories; they emerge through a historical process of configuring and re-configuring.
Displacement, war, state-religious relations, and external interventions, among
others, figure prominently in these processes. When assumptions are made about
sectarian identities and boundaries Shami (2005: 573) argues they ‘alternately
exaggerate or underestimate societal tensions and political mobilization’ based
on this categorization that obscures the ways in which identity and boundaries are
produced and reproduced. In the media and official US discourse, sect, tribe, and
ethnicity have been strategically and discursively circulated as primary components
of the local social order. In the US discourse on the war on Iraq, the term ‘tribe’
was appended to ‘Sunni’. US forces have coordinated with, mobilized, distributed
funds to, and armed ‘Sunni tribes’ as a counterinsurgency force (e.g. Awakening
Councils). They may be endowing with power and military and financial resources
groups and leaders that were hardly self-evident social and political entities.2 Among
US policy makers and pundits, these social categories were framed as ‘age-old’,
‘timeless’, and the sources of ‘ancient hatred’. Re-invigorating critical scholarship
on sectarianism and its historical manifestations is certainly called for at this time
as is a rethinking of the concept of tribe. In the1970s, explorations of sectarianism
peaked in the region and then declined. Current US policies and discourse as well
as the media and popular understandings assume an already given ethnic, sectar-
ian, and tribal structure and sentiment to contemporary Iraq. Lutz (2006: 594)
calls for a joint project to theorize empire and capture it ethnographically, which
would entail attention to the ‘cultural making of value’ to give recognition to the
human face of empire rather than concentrating largely on its political-economic
underpinnings.
In Iraq, a country with once subterranean sectarian tensions but without a history
of open, prolonged sectarian conflict, the occupation, which exposed fault lines
that exploded as well-calibrated sect-based violence, as well as the continuing
violence against Iraqi civilians by the occupation forces, have propelled millions
of people3 to flee their homes and seek shelter and safety either outside of Iraq or
within its borders. Paradoxically, the level of violence necessary to craft sectarian
space may be an indication of how fluid and cosmopolitan Iraq was in terms of
ethnic-sectarian co-existence.
In a move reminiscent of the Sykes–Picot Treaty dividing the region between
France and Britain, nearly a century later, in the fall of 2007 then US Senator Biden’s
non-binding resolution to divide Iraq was approved by 75 votes to 23 in the US
Senate. US policy and practices propelling partition into three semi-autonomous
zones indicated a willful ignorance of the history of partitions – India–Pakistan,
Palestine–Israel, and Ireland among others – with their demographic upheavals, the
toll in human lives, and the long-term instability they can generate. Is there any his-
torical precedent to Iraq’s division and, if so, can and should it by mobilized for the
present? The proposed sectarian and ethnic spaces re-affirm the vision of a regional
mosaic and, at the same time, cast doubts on the notion of a more encompassing
Iraqi identity. Abou Samra (2007: 37) makes a provocative observation: displace-
ment as a result of US and Iraqi forces is ‘assessed as a short-term phenomenon,
while so-called sectarian-induced displacement is viewed as a long-term trend’.
Recourse to primordial explanations of ‘age old hatreds’ lends the potency of time-
lessness to our understanding of the conflict. This recourse tends to then cast the
conflict as inevitable and deflects attention from analysis of the context. The Iraqi
displacement may join that of the Armenians, Palestinians, and Kurds as human
tragedies that re-write the demographic, political, and geo-social map of the region
and contribute to the fashioning of ethnic-sectarian realities.
The US occupation of Iraq created a set of conditions that has led to one of the
largest refugee flows in decades and a humanitarian emergency that has all but
been ignored by the US, drastically under-reported by the media, and dithered
over by the international community. Three waves of displacement can be identi-
fied. First, with the disassembling of the state and the de-Baathification process,
tens of thousands of people were left unemployed and military personnel were
de-commissioned. When combined with pervasive lawlessness and kidnappings
for ransom that targeted those with some capital, the first wave began. In 2004, the
second wave was triggered by US counter-insurgency operations that compelled
flight to avoid violence. In 2005, a third wave could be discerned: those fleeing
ethnic cleansing and death squads. Professionals, technocrats, and managers are
prominent among the displaced – some estimates put their number as high as 40 per-
cent of the professional class – and this does not bode well for the reconstruction
of Iraq and its future stability and growth.
By spring of 2007, the number of Iraqi refugees was staggering: an estimated
two million Iraqis had sought refuge across the border in Jordan (around 750,000–
1,000,000), about 15 per cent of Jordan’s population) and in Syria (1.5–1.6 million,
about 10 percent of its population), and tens of thousands are in Egypt (100,000),
Lebanon (40,000), Iran (54,000), the Gulf states (200,000), and Turkey (10,000).4
About one in six, or about 15 percent of the population, were either refugees or
IDPs. In contravention of international law on the right to seek asylum, neighboring
host states are increasingly closing their borders to Iraqis seeking asylum. Within
Iraq, over two million people are estimated to be IDPs.5
Since February 2006, 1,037,615 Iraqis became IDPs at a rate of 80,000–100,000
people a month; this figure does not include IDPs from prior to February 2006.6 As
brutal ethnic-sectarian cleansing escalated, people sought refuge in neighborhoods
with a prevalence of their particular sect. Formerly cosmopolitan or ‘mixed’7 neigh-
borhoods became forcibly homogenized spaces. The extreme violence – threats,
torture, kidnappings, murder – it took to effect such ostensibly homogeneous spaces
is an indication of how alien is the idea and Iraqi resistance to sectarianism. Like
Rwanda and Bosnia, Iraq had a fairly substantial rate of inter-marriage among
its constituents groups – in this case – Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds. What happens to
these now transgressive families when sect is politically mobilized and becomes a
means of allocating space, resources, identity, and protection? In addition, Iraq is
home to a number of minorities: Turkomen, Yazidis, Armenians, Christians, and
Mandeans, among others.
18 Julie Peteet
According to a report published by the International Organization for Migration
(IOM), less than 1 percent of the displaced are in camps. With little health care or
electricity, minimal sanitation facilities, and paltry supplies of food and water, IOM
calls the desolate desert camps ‘the last resort’.8 Iraqi refugees outside the country
are concentrated in capital cities: Amman, Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo where more
often than not they now reside illegally. As states of first asylum, Jordan and Syria
have received the bulk of Iraq’s refugees and have received little assistance from
the US and the international community. The United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) has criticized the lack of aid to these two countries who
are shouldering the burden of over two million refugees (Raghavan 2007). In both
countries, infrastructures have been unbearably stretched as the crush of refugees
overwhelmed already limited water supplies, electricity, housing, education, and
health care resources, not to mention employment. In addition, receiving Arab
countries have security concerns that have acted to limit entrance to those seeking
refuge. Iraqi refugees are often referred to as ‘guests’, a freighted term in Arabic,
rather than refugees. The appellation of guest invokes the elaborate etiquette of
Arab hospitality on the part of the host but also the guest. While the host is obliged
to provide for the guest, the guest is supposed to know when to leave and to be
able to estimate how much the host can offer and for how long. Both Jordan and
Syria have been closing their borders to Iraqis seeking refuge citing the lack of
assistance from the international community and the stretching of their states’
limited resources to shoulder such a burden. Receiving states also are wary of the
long-term nature of Iraqi displacement, fearing a prolonged refugee presence as
happened with the Palestinians after 1948.
While the displaced reverberate regionally, outside they have been largely invis-
ible and voiceless. This raises the question of the camp as a spatial device. In
camps, refugees can potentially constitute an aggregate, spatially legible popula-
tion and they can be places where national identity is reproduced and takes on new
contours. Like Palestinian refugees in the first decades of exile, the Iraqi refugees
are barely visible on the international scene. Most significantly, in the face of this
nearly unparalleled flow of refugees, the US and the international community have
largely been silent, refusing until very recently to even acknowledge a humanitar-
ian emergency. This raises an interesting set of issues that will have to be explored
in studies of displacement. For example, humanitarian organizations consider the
near absence of refugee camps for Iraqis in a positive light. Perhaps camps will
be subject to re-thinking in future refugee crises, particularly in heavily urban
areas.
Spaces of containment
With millions of Iraqis having crossed international borders, the absence of Iraqi
refugee camps in host countries Syria or Jordan may be an indication of a shift in
the international refugee regimes’ policy and practices (as well as an indication of
the urban origins of most of the displaced – Iraq was around 75 per cent urban).
It is worth contextualizing this in the observation that casualties of contemporary
warfare hover around 90 percent civilian compared to a hundred years ago when
the civilian/non-civilian ratio was reversed (B. Turner 2006).
Spatial devices to shelter and manage the displaced can range from camps and
safe havens to transit centers and open-relief centers, places where refugees can
be protected and provided with relief. Iraqi refugees have sought refuge, by and
large, in urban areas; increasingly as poorer refugees flee and those who have been
displaced for a while are running out of money, they are seeking shelter in poorer
areas of town. Refugee organizations and non-governmental organization (NGO)
publications fairly consistently report that Iraqis will not go to camps. Although
camps are not default spaces for the displaced and they have been duly criticized
for warehousing refugees, within those spaces refugees can re-inscribe their mean-
ing. Camps make refugees spatially legible but not necessarily visible in global
consciousness or memory. If states are unwilling to provide asylum and close their
borders and the UNHCR is opposed to setting up camps because they are costly and
can become permanent, might camps disappear? If they do, will refugees become
invisible as well? Without camps, do the displaced run the risk of becoming invisible
and atomized exiles rather than a self-conscious aggregate with a potential voice
and identity? We need to probe the implications of this trend for refugee rights,
voice, and identity. It is important to note that while camps can contain and govern
refugees in repressive ways, these small spaces are also imprinted by refugees and
provide spaces for formulating new subjectivities as well as places from which to
organize politically (Hammond 2004; Peteet 2005). Another reason perhaps for
the absence of camps is the fear that they would be interpreted as an acknowledg-
ment of the long-term nature of the refugee crisis. Yet we must acknowledge that
the living conditions of the urban refugee is often much better than that of a camp
dweller and communal life is not absent. In Jordan and Syria, Iraqi refugees are
relatively integrated into the urban fabric, especially the labor markets. In Syria,
Iraqi refugees have a communitarian life replete with social networks, restaurants,
clubs, and religious shrines. With the advent of new communication technologies,
refugees are no longer necessarily cut off from home.
While the Iraqi refugees may be forming ‘little Baghdads’ or areas of heavy
concentration, we need to ask to what extent these embody the potential to re-
create geo-social worlds and yet be radically transformative in the process. When
refugees are scattered in urban area such as Amman and Damascus, they may
transform the urban geography of these cities just as Palestinian refugees did in
Beirut and Amman. Unlike camps, Iraqi spaces are not delineated from the larger
society nor are they defined as spaces for the displaced. How sectarianism plays
into refugee reception and whether the provisioning of aid by sectarian organiza-
tions engenders sectarian affiliations and identities should be high on the research
agenda. For example, Shia refugees have reported being turned back at the Jordanian
border on the basis of their sectarian affiliation. In Lebanon, Christian Iraqis have
been encouraged to seek shelter and aid in predominantly Christian East Beirut.
In some cases, sectarian aid organizations may provide more access to relief than
the UNHCR. The absence of camps has to be conceptualized in a set of global
processes and practices relating to containment of refugees. In the 1990s a more
20 Julie Peteet
restrictive state-centric global consensus to prevent refugee movements material-
ized. As states closed their borders to refugees, new spatial devices to contain the
displaced arose: safe havens, safe corridors, preventive zones, safe spaces, and
protected zones. The move from camps to safe havens to urban dispersal begs the
question: will refugee camps become an artifact of the twentieth century? What
spatial forms, if any, will take their place? What is the role of ‘securitization’
policies and discourses that have dominated formulations of state policies in the
region and globally? Camps are expensive to run, unduly burden receiving states,
and embody the potential to de-stabilize host countries. As refugee fatigue and the
recognition that refugee aggregates can de-stabilize neighboring countries took hold
in the West and across the globe over the past two decades, an unwillingness to
host refugees has become more prevalent. Since the founding of the UNHCR, three
solutions to refuges situations have crystallized: local integration, resettlement, and
repatriation. Yet for Iraqis, resettlement is presented by the UNHCR as a preferred
solution. This is despite the US and Europe’s unwillingness to accept any signific-
ant number of refugees. Why is repatriation not on the agenda for Iraqi refugees
and where are they to re-settle?In the current colonial cartography in Palestine and
Iraq, spatial containment can be juxtaposed to strikingly uneven mobility. Bauman
(1998: 9, 2) dubs mobility the ‘most powerful and coveted stratifying factor’ and
an ‘unequally distributed commodity’. Research to plumb the ways mobility is
produced, its complex unevenness, and how it intersects with containment is called
for. Palestine and Iraq represent two sides of the mobility coin: millions of Iraqis
are being forcibly displaced, which contributes to the creation of sectarian space,
while Palestinians are subjected to enforced immobility or containment intended
to eventually propel some level of emigration from Palestine, or at the least from
rural areas to selected urban centers. The freedom to move and the hierarchies built
around its possibilities, are nowhere more apparent than in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip where mobility is exceedingly circumscribed. The wall, checkpoints, barriers,
barbed wire, and watchtowers are all measures to reduce and control mobility and
sort out and separate populations; these physical obstacles are accompanied by
administrative measures to curb mobility such as curfews and the permit system.
B. Turner (2006: 8) perceptively comments: ‘Human rights in a global world are,
increasingly, rights of social and geographic mobility. This was one crucial lesson
of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.’ Israel’s strategy in the West Bank is multi-
pronged – spatial as well as legal and military. Mobility is a scarce right distributed
along national, ethic-sectarian lines, nearly every dimension of which is under
Israeli control. Mobility is a tangible thing that some have and others don’t. Israeli
cars whiz through checkpoints with a friendly wave of the hand and a smile while
Palestinian cars are backed up in long lines waiting for permission to pass. Across
the region Palestinian refugees are exceedingly vulnerable – from the violence
against them in Iraq and their dire situation in desolate largely un-aided camps on
the Iraqi–Jordanian border to Gazans stranded at the Egyptian–Gaza crossing, from
refugees in Lebanon displaced from Nahr el-Bared to the forced immobility and
confinement of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israelis have
not pursued a temporally bounded mass expulsion that would constitute Palestinians
as refugees and instead have had recourse to strategies such as closure to encourage
slow motion, or incremental, demographic changes to generate migrants rather than
refugees. This coincides with a global move to deny refugee status and its attendant
benefits to all but a select few. Closure, enclavization (Gaza), and exclavization
(the West Bank) are strategies to dismember the remnants of Palestine and obstruct
geographic contiguity. In these shrinking enclaves and exclaves, which resemble
and are described by Palestinians as open-air prisons or camps, the population is
a captive one. This novel camp, or prison, is now being enacted by closure with
its concrete walls, fences, checkpoints, and the permit system, which materialize
separation and exclusion. In Iraq, new spatial imaginaries to contain those who flee
violence are evident in proposals for buffer zones and refugee collection points to
serve as ‘catch basins’, intended as a non-place for refugees, and a new non-subject,
the illegible refugee. Non-places are spatial expressions of liminality or suspen-
sion. V. Turner (1967: 96) pinpoints the character of liminal people: ‘They are at
once no longer classified and not yet classified.’ Pollack and Byman (2007: 44–5)
call for setting up buffer zones within Iraq to ‘serve as “catch basins”’ that would
prevent ‘spillover’ of the displaced into neighboring countries and their potential
destabilization. They also note that if refugee camps were set up outside of Iraq
the refugees could be ‘armed and manipulated’ by those host states. Containing the
refugees inside Iraq also reduces the legal rights they would acquire if they crossed
an international border (Pollack and Byman 2007: 44–5). These devices seem like
variations on the safe haven. While water metaphors to describe the potential impact
of mass displacement can be difficult to avoid in refugee and immigration studies
– waves, flows, floods, tidal waves, inundations, a sea of people, etc., in Iraq they
have taken a new twist with the hydraulic ‘catch-basin’ concept and the ‘spill-over
effect’. According to the dictionary Webster’s, catch-basins are ‘a sievelike device
at the entrance to the intersection of a sewer, for retaining solid matter likely to
clog the sewer’. In this hydraulic image, Iraqis are metaphorically the equivalent
of sludge. Catch basins would be located in border areas close to airfields in Iraq
and thus could be easily supplied by the US. In them, refugees would have neither
international protection nor would there necessarily be an international body to
take responsibility. The goal of a catch-basin is to prevent cross-border movement
and, most significantly, US forces could contain the refugees while also disarming
and pacifying them. As non-refugees, akin to an ecological by-product, they are
not just a non-political issue, they are hardly even a humanitarian one. Their legal
rights would have all but been eviscerated.
Another new spatial device has appeared in Baghdad. A cement wall has been
erected ostensibly to reduce violence but also to obstruct mobility between sectors
of the socio-spatial urban fabric now characterized as ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shi’ite’, akin
to Israel’s wall in the West Bank to enforce separation.
Re-coding: the mantra of security

Refugees arouse little sympathy in a situation where they are increasingly conflated
with the criminal, which is magnified if they are Muslims. Displaced Iraqis have
22 Julie Peteet
appeared at a time of dramatically changing conceptions of refugees, new forms
of containment, and a lack of international response to their needs. New forms of
warfare, the break-up of states, ethnic cleansings, and an increasing unwillingness
of states to accept refugees have generated new ways of defining the displaced and
the means of addressing them. Refugees are no longer iconic figures of compassion
in dire need of aid. The current yoking of refugees to security issues well pre-dates
9/11, although 9/11 certainly magnified the securitization of refuges flows. In the
political orbit of the post-Cold War world, refugees were no longer welcomed in
Europe and the US as scoring an ideological victory over Communism. As public
opinion began to demand limits to immigration, the doors of asylum tightened.
Refugee flows were obstructed by tightening entry and asylum procedures on
the one hand and introducing new measures of containment in refugee-producing
sites. With wars in the 1990s in the Balkans and Iraq, containment emerged as the
new approach to displacement. Containing the displaced within the borders of the
state in safe havens or widely scattered, who are then classified as IDPs, protects
the sovereignty of potential host states and minimizes the potential for regional
de-stabilization sparked by large refugee flows. In addition, containment dilutes
the need for an international response.
Should we conceptualize the displaced as ‘refugees’, ‘forced migrants’, or
diasporic9 as academics increasingly do? What are the legal, humanitarian, and
political consequences of such re-conceptualizations? Does classifying refugees
as forced migrants dilute the international commitment to provide assistance, pro-
tection, and durable solutions? Forced migration may aptly describe the current
situation of migration in which the categories of refugee and forced migrant overlap
but it still does not have the capacity to instigate action or intervention on behalf
of the displaced. What happens to Palestinians who leave the West Bank because
of the impact of the wall on their livelihood, education, health care etc. – are they
simply migrants joining a diaspora, uncounted, voiceless, and invisible without any
international recognition? Terminological innovations should follow new patterns
and types of displacement. For example, a new category of IDPs is materializing
in the West Bank. The 50,000 or so residents of the Seam Zone (the area between
the wall and the Green Line) who find their mobility and access to their lands
increasingly restricted through the permit system are moving to other areas of
the West Bank. The pattern that initially seems to be crystallizing is that some
members of a family will move and some will stay put. An estimated 20 percent
of residents of the ‘closed area’ report household members moving to other places
within the West Bank (Badil 2007: 21). This is a period of ambiguity as extant
terms are challenged by novel situations of displacement. On the one hand, the
modern twentieth-century concept of the ‘refugee’ arose from the displacement
that followed war and exclusivist nationalisms and, on the other, from the sub-
sequent emergence of administrative regimes that observe, enumerate, and govern
the displaced and in so doing construct them as a legal category and subjects of
intervention. In its very usage, ‘refugee’ once called for international intervention
and solutions. Will the conceptual category of ‘forced migrants’ eventually elicit
calls for intervention?
In the broader context of the post-9/11 world, the displaced are conceptualized
less in terms of their rights under international law and in humanitarian terms and
more as a security matter. Esmeir (2004: 3) reminds us that security can be a ‘Black
Hole’ in which things ‘collapse and disappear’, a ‘magical term able to absorb any
and all content’. In much the same way that the US joins together a wide array of
militant groups from Hezbollah to al-Qaeda, so some analysts categorize refugees
with a host of others. For example Brookings Institute analysts, Pollack and Byman
(2006a: 7), refer to the difficulties the US faced in stopping the ‘flow of dangerous
people across Iraq’s border . . . refugees, militias, foreign invaders and terrorists’. In
other words, refugees are now the equivalent of terrorists.10 They also refer to Iraqi
refugees as ‘carriers of conflict’ (Pollack and Byman 2006b). ‘Carrier’ evokes a
pathogen, bringing disease in its wake much like Haitian asylum seekers in the US
were cast as carriers of AIDS. Once objects of concern and assistance, refugees are
now indistinguishable from potential criminals and terrorists who may sow instabil-
ity much as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s were seen as ‘ripe for recruitment to
communism’, then as subversives and eventually as terrorists, which successfully
deflected recognition of a refugee crisis (Peteet 2005: 67). In Lebanon, camps have
been referred to as ‘security islands’, lawless places outside the bounds of the state
and thus challenges to state sovereignty. Palestinians were deemed a security issue
decades before refugees in general became criminalized and policy became ‘secu-
ritized’. In Jordan during the late 1960s and early 1970s, camps were discursively
coded as extra-territorial or subversive sites out of the bounds of the state. Once
Palestinian resistance forces were defeated and disarmed by the Jordanian army,
the camps, now well monitored and surveyed by the Jordanian regime, were seen
as pacified but always potentially subversive hence the need for continuing strict
controls. In Lebanon, once the Palestinian ‘guests’ became burdens by overstay-
ing their welcome and organizing politically, their camps became potential sites
of subversion. In Jordan and Lebanon, the organic state, that unitary body, seemed
threatened by the camps, which were framed as polluting, if not contagious.11
In coding refugees as potential subversives, they join the overlapping and also
indistinguishable categories of Islamists, terrorists, and criminals. Or, Iraqi refu-
gees may simply be invisible, no longer even calculated into the human costs of
war. Former US Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), John Bolton, stated that
Iraqi refugees had ‘absolutely nothing to do’ with the US invasion and occupa-
tion. Furthermore, he asserted, ‘our obligation was to give them new institutions
and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an
obligation to compensate for the hardships of war’ (quoted in Rosen 2007: 74, 78).
The category of refugee is shrinking and is available to only a select few (Zetter
2007). The idea of un-classifying Palestinian refugees and suspending or diluting
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) operation is decades old.
In a new twist, there is a move underway to have Arab Jews who settled in Israel
labeled ‘refugees’; in other words a retroactive (50 years) classification as refugees.
Resolutions have been introduced in the US House of Representatives and the
Senate to include Jewish refugees in any mention of the resolution of the Palestinian
refugee situation. This classificatory tactic is intended to dilute the specificity of the
24 Julie Peteet
Palestinians experience, recast it as part of an exchange of populations, and ensure
that any future discussions of reparations or repatriation are counter-balanced by
Jewish ‘refugee’ demands (Radler 2004). Calls for UNRWA to re-settle Palestinian
refugees rather than have them remain in camps have been voiced frequently. A
senior UN official told me that ‘it is only Israeli extremists who call for an end to
UNRWA. Israeli security and government understand that UNRWA is a necessity
because otherwise Israeli would have to provide for the camps in the occupied
territories.’ In effect, UNRWA absolves them of responsibility.
The specter of Palestine, what is known in the world of humanitarian assistance
as ‘Palestinianization’, in part, underwrites these strategies and policies toward
refugees and the shrinking of the refugee category in the Middle East. Locally the
collective memory of 1948 and 1967 nuances the reception, treatment, and labeling
of the displaced. Governments also fear losing control over the process. Jordan
and Syria have not labeled the Iraqis crossing their borders seeking sanctuary as
refugees; both play host to a substantial Palestinian refugee population for whom
the international community seems unable to provide durable solutions. As para-
digmatic refugees, Palestinians provide lessons for the international management
of displacement. Aid workers refer to the ‘Palestinianization’ of a refugee crisis
when it is feared it will be prolonged, when durable solutions seem unattainable. To
capture the depth of the crisis and their despair, Iraqi refugees refer to themselves
as the ‘new Palestinians’, a highly resonant invocation in the region. Palestinian
refugees provide a valuable lesson in the long-term human cost of re-mapping
regions and dismantling place to make way for new political spaces and projects.
Iraqi refugees have the potential to become the new ‘Middle East crisis’ in much the
same way Palestinians have been for decades, a rallying point for mobilizing anti-
government and anti-US sentiment. If there were camps and they became militarized
and politicized like the Palestinians refugee camps once were, it is surmised, they
could pose a threat to regional stability. In Palestinian camps, as well as Afghan
camps in Pakistan and those in Central America during the 1980s, refugees politic-
ally organized, mobilized, and recruited for militant resistance and the camps could,
but did not always, serve as bases for training and launching militant actions. In
her award winning book, Condemned to Repeat?, Terry has carefully set out how
refugee camps or humanitarian sanctuaries, with their connotations of being ‘civil-
ian, public and neutral’ can ‘provide advantages to guerrilla factions over purely
military sanctuaries’, which are ‘militarized, secret and political’ (Terry 2002: 9,
10). While her suggestions are certainly not to do away with refugee camps, her
observations could be mobilized in support of such arguments. Along with the fear
of ‘Palestinianization’, Terry’s observations may underlie the apparent interest in
spatial or non-spatial alternatives to camps. Another factor may be that camps are
an acknowledgment that displacement will be long term. As the refugees become
more and more impoverished, and unless aid is increased substantially, how long
can Jordan and Syria continue to host them?
Agier (2002) argues that refugees are constituted by the wars that give rise to
them as well as the humanitarian responses that deal with aggregate populations
of displaced. I have argued elsewhere that UNRWA has played a pivotal role in
the production and reproduction of a Palestinian identity in Lebanon. Agier (2002)
writes that ‘[o]fficially designated camps are reported to contain altogether 87.6
per cent of the refugees assisted by UNHCR’. Interestingly, he comments that
camps and UNHCR assistance are ‘unequally distributed around the globe’ with
camps being ‘more common in Africa and Asia’. Indeed camps constitute a ‘global
space’ for the humanitarian management of the displaced, those out-of-place in
the global order (Agier 2002: 320). In the absence of camps, where are the spaces
of humanitarianism? How is humanitarian aid being distributed and how is pro-
tection being provided? Could catch-basins become the new safe havens? If so,
what happens to the right to seek asylum? A critical question concerns the role of
relief institutions and the set of experiences they produce; UNRWA was a pivotal
and transformative institution, shaping Palestinian refugee identity in manifold
ways. For example, receiving and consuming rations as an aggregate population
rendering them a medium for affirming identities.
UNHCR is playing a major role as a lead agency by offering some services
and protection, and mobilizing donors. Neither Syria nor Jordan is a signatory
to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. Both anticipate a return of the refu-
gees. UNHCR has designated the refugees as ‘prima facie’. Jordan has refused
to call them refugees instead referring to them first as guests, a culturally loaded
term in Arabic, then as visa holders and increasingly as illegals; only 20,000 are
registered with UNHCR as asylum seekers most likely related to real concerns
over becoming legible and thus visible. Palestinians have consistently insisted on
staying on UNRWA rolls because doing so retains and reproduces their claim to
Palestine and registers an injustice. Most importantly, registration invokes inter-
national responsibility. In the absence of camps and an identifiable refugee aid
regime, will refugeehood become an individual condition of life or does it have
the potential to be a condition that shapes the contours of a new shared identity?
How will categories of difference play into local and regional politics? Especially
where refugees settle among citizens, distinctions between the two can become
sources of tension; refugee influxes can drive up the cost of housing and food and
put tangible pressure on services; humanitarian agencies assist refugees but not the
citizens. The categories don’t define need, only one’s relation to a state and legal
identity. How will humanitarian spaces be reconfigured in the new global conditions
of conflict? How will the Palestinian and Iraqi experience affect conceptualizations
of refugees, IDPs, camps, and humanitarian assistance? Humanitarian space has
all but disappeared in Iraq because of operational difficulties due to the security
situation. Humanitarian organizations in Iraq and elsewhere may be increasingly
losing the label of neutral, often being seen by their intended recipients as complicit
with the occupying forces. In the Iraq case, US forces and private contractors often
present their activities as humanitarian thus obfuscating military–humanitarian
lines of distinction. This puts actual humanitarian agencies and their personnel
at risk as their proclaimed neutrality becomes suspect. Attacks on the aid organi-
zations and their staff have had a definite impact on the way NGOs operate in
Iraq and suggest future directions. In the face of attacks, international humanitar-
ian organizations have moved their offices and higher-level staff to neighboring
26 Julie Peteet
Jordan and Kuwait where they operate from what is now commonly referred to as
‘remote control’.
The term ‘humanitarian’ itself can be a subject of critique. In the late 1960s and
throughout the 1970s, Palestinian activists insisted that the refugees were not a
humanitarian issue but a political one; humanitarian interventions, often elided with
charity, were disparaged as de-politicizing what was in essence a political ques-
tion. However, to this day, Palestinians insist that UNRWA registration and ration
cards indicate an international responsibility for them and constitute recognition
of their loss (Peteet 2005). An unsettling if not incredible silence about the trauma
of millions of Iraqis accompanied the US occupation. Neither refugees nor IDPs
were publicly acknowledged by then President Bush. While the war itself may be
daily front-page news, this is one of the least media covered humanitarian crises
in decades. To acknowledge well over four million displaced Iraqis would be to
admit to the unimaginable violence and chaos generated by the occupation and an
admission that not only has the war been lost but also it unleashed an enormous
humanitarian crisis for which the US bears primary responsibility. Malkki (1996:
386–7) contrasts the widespread twentieth-century circulation of ‘visual represen-
tations of refugees’ – a sort of ‘mobile mode of knowledge about them’ and ‘key
vehicle in the elaboration of transnational social imagination of refugeeness’ with
the paucity of refugee narratives. Yet in the West, particularly in the US, there are
few visual images and almost no voices of displaced Iraqi or Palestinian refugees
or those confined in enclaves. A startling comparison can be made to the displaced
Kosovars, the Iraqi Kurds displaced in 1991, and more recently the displaced in
Darfur.12 Darfur is treated as a classic twentieth-century refugee crisis. Why? There
is little risk that Darfuris will emigrate in large numbers to the West and in the dis-
course of the ‘war on terror’, the Sudanese regime, coded as ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’
is responsible, making apportionment of blame and accountability logical to the
‘war on terror’ and politically convenient. A campaign of silence and darkness has
descended over the Palestinians behind the wall and the nearly unprecedented dis-
mantlement of Iraq, the brutal dispersion of a significant portion of its population,
and the re-mapping of its social geography.
Conclusion
The US, Israel, and the Arab states are acting in ways to reduce refugees: Israel’s
closure produces migrants and/or IDPs who, it will be claimed, left of their own voli-
tion. Displaced Iraqi refugees remain unrecognized as refugees in the region and by
the US administration. Repatriation may be the preferred solution to refugee crises.
Yet in the Middle East, repatriation of Palestinian refugees has never been seriously
regarded by the international community. The UNHCR talks of resettlement for
the Iraqis yet it is clearly not on the horizon. Without a massive infusion of aid, the
absorptive capacity of Jordan and Syria may have reached its peak. Then there is
the question of their capacity politically to absorb a new population. In 2007, the
US took a paltry 7,000; European states accepted relatively more but the numbers
were not enough to make a dent in the growing number of Iraqis refugees.
The displaced Iraqis are emblematic of the imaginary mosaic and the humanitar-
ian disaster it has unleashed. The spatial configuration of Iraqi displacement and
responses to it may portend future trends in refugee policy. Non-recognition of the
Iraqi displaced suggests further re-definition of the term in a way that diminishes the
right to asylum, protection, and assistance. In other words, fewer and fewer people
will be able to claim refugee status. Zetter (2007: 16) argues that the category of
refugee is shrinking and becoming ‘a highly prized status’. New spatial devices
beyond the camp and the safe haven seem to be in the works. Or perhaps, there will
simply be non-places for the displaced as they merge into the surrounding urban
areas with little if any recognition. Non-recognition mutes the voice of refugees
and renders the nominally responsible parties oblivious to their needs. The lack of
a concerted response to the Iraqi humanitarian crisis may be indicative of a gradual
shift from concern with refugee rights to increasing invisibility and exclusion on
a selective basis. While some displaced remain unseen and hardly heard (Iraqis,
Palestinians, and Somalis among others) in comparison others have been or are
clearly visible (Kosovars and Darfuris).
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the generous support of the American
Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan, the Palestinian American
Research Center (PARC), and the University of Louisville.
Notes
1 Over the past century, not just conflict but development projects, environmental dis-
asters and sedentarization projects have precipitated displacement (Shami 1994). The
region is also heavily implicated in another kind if displacement or migration; it imports
hundreds of thousands of workers. Within the region, some countries export local labor
(for example, Yemen and Egypt) to oil-producing states. North Africa and Turkey have
significant histories of exporting labor to European countries.
2 This is what Aiden Southall refers to in the African context as ‘definition by illusion’
or the false application of the label ‘tribe’ usually to ‘a large scale which becomes
permanently adopted for administrative convenience and ultimately accepted by the
people themselves’ (Southall 1970: 45).
3 Estimates are that 4.7 million Iraqis are displaced; 2.7 million are IDPs and more than two
million are refugees in neighboring states. ‘The Continuing Needs of Iraq’s Displaced’,
UNHCR (www.unhcr.org/Iraq) (accessed March 1, 2009).
4 See ‘Statistics on Displaced Iraqis around the World’, UNHCR (www.unhcr.org).
5 In the new global politics of displacement, IDPs, those who flee their homes but do not
cross an international border, mushroomed from 1.2 million in 1992 to over 20 million
in 2006, significantly outnumbering refugees.
6 ‘Iraq: Number of IDPs Tops One Million, Says Iraqi Red Crescent’, UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. July 9, 2007. (www.irinnews.org).
7 For a pointed and poignant examination of the term ‘mixed areas’, see Al-Mufti
(2006: 28).
8 Most of these camps are temporary affairs – often just a few weeks or months until they
close as residents find better accommodations. Some are spontaneous sites created by
IDPs in large buildings or schools – and house very small numbers often ranging from
28 Julie Peteet
30 to 100 families. UNHCR sites (around seven) in Iraq provide aid, shelter, and legal
advice but they have not set up camps.
9 For a critique of the concept of a Palestinian diaspora see Peteet (2007).
10 In Gary Trudeau’s well-respected and widely syndicated cartoon strip, Doonesbury, Ray
has been followed home from Iraq by a terrorist. When asked why, he replies: ‘He said
he was a refugee.’ Courier-Journal August 21, 2007, p. 7.
11 The discourse of pollution may have been more pronounced in Lebanon where the popu-
lation was Lebanese unlike in Jordan where over 50 per cent of the non-camp population
was Palestinian. Palestinian narratives cast the Jordanian Bedu as exhibiting the most
violent behavior toward Palestinian fighters and civilians during the Jordanian regime’s
1970 military offensive against Palestinian guerillas known as Black September.
12 For a probing look at the place of campaigns for Darfur in the US see Mamdani
(2007).
2 Governing the Palestinian
refugee camps in Lebanon
and Syria
The cases of Nahr el-Bared and
Yarmouk camps
Sari Hanafi
Introduction
Camps have been presented by some humanitarian organizations and political
actors as settings self evidently suitable for dealing with the refugee populations.
However, when camps become the transient space for a population dwelling there
for more than 60 years, like in the case of the Palestinian protracted refugees, camps
become slum areas that are hard to govern.
This chapter will attempt to clarify the relationship between power, sovereignty
and space in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, by examining modes
of governance inside the camps. ‘Modes of governance’ refers to how a camp is
managed in terms of relationships to the legal authorities of the host country and
to the surrounding municipalities, relationships among groups within the camps
and conflict resolution for everyday problems. The United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) recognizes ‘governance’ as autonomy over formal institutions
as well as informal ones:
[G]overnance is the exercise of economic, political and administrative author-

ity to manage a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises the mechanisms,
processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their
interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their
differences.
(UNDP 1997: 2–3)
This chapter recognizes the informality of governance, inspired by Foucault’s con-

cept of governmentalities, i.e. ‘how we think about governing others and ourselves
within a variety of contexts’ (Dean 1999: 212).1 Governmentalities thus grant us
one more analytical tool for understanding power as something distributed rather
than wielded from above.
This chapter illustrates the need to (re)examine governance, not from a security
angle but from a segregation angle. Segregation becomes a central concept in debates
about the spatial concentration of social risk and about urban/local governance. I
30 Sari Hanafi
argue that while Syrian authorities have taken a strategic decision since 1948 to
incorporate the Palestinian camps into the tissue of the surrounding city, Lebanon
did the opposite. Camps there were perceived as ‘security islands’, treated as spaces
of exception and experimental laboratories for control and surveillance.
While the governance of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria
will be explored, the focus will be placed on the Nahr el-Bared camp (north of
Lebanon) and in Yarmouk camp (Damascus, Syria). This chapter relies primarily
on the field research, direct observation and in-depth interviews with camp lead-
ers and inhabitants that I conducted in Nahr el-Bared and other camps in Lebanon
with the help of a research team in 2008–9 and in Yarmouk camp from March
until July 2009.
Camp governance: multiple actors

Many actors play a role in the governance of Palestinian refugee camps. In Syria,
the state controls camps closely, through specific organs: it is the General Authority
for Palestine Arab Refugees (GAPAR) that assigns a camp director who plays a
major role in organizing the urban and political life inside the camp. In contrast
to this classical state control over slum areas including camps, the situation in
the Lebanon is radically different. There is a web of complex power structures
composed of popular committees, a security committee, United Nations Relief
and Works Agency (UNRWA) camp officers, notables, political factions, Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) popular unions and organizations (workers, women,
engineers, etc), community-based organizations (CBOs),2 non-governmental organi-
zations (NGOs)3 and the Palestinian Muslim Scholars’ League (imam coalition
close to Hamas). These forces vary in importance from camp to camp and from
area to area. In each camp, leaders impose measures, which frequently change,
a consequence of a constantly shifting balance of power between these different
groups. The Popular Committee, however, stands out as the most important local
governing body in Lebanon. It is worth noting that the label ‘popular’ could be
misleading because members are not elected, rather it projects the strength of one
group or party vis-à-vis others. The Tables 2.1 and 2.2 summarizes the different
actors of governance and are based on how the importance of different stakeholders
is classified according to the interviewees.
Instead of one sovereign, camps are ruled by a tapestry of multiple, partial sover-
eignties. This includes real sovereigns (the Lebanese and Syrian authorities) and a
web of actors who contribute to the governance of the camp. The situation is made
even more complex if UNRWA’s role is taken into account. Here, I would like to
introduce the notion of ‘phantom sovereignty’ in order to describe and analyze the
critical position of the UNRWA in both Syria and Lebanon.
Michel Foucault reminds us that it is not the power that stems from the exercise
of sovereignty but rather the effects of power that a governmental technology gener-
ates. While UNRWA was not intended to, nor does it pretend to, govern the camps,
it is ascribed the status of a sovereign by many camp dwellers. This is perhaps
best exemplified by the ambiguous role of UNRWA’s ‘camp officers’ (the precise
Governing the Palestinian refugee camps 31
Table 2.1 Actors of the camp governance
Syria Lebanon
Leading authority Local committee (LC) Delegitimized popular

(assigned by GAPAR) committee
Second leading authority Committee of Development Factions: Fatah or Hamas
(assigned by GAPAR)
Phantom authority UNRWA UNRWA
Islamic governmentalities Hamas and conservative Hamas and conservative
popular Syrian Islam popular Lebanese Islam
Table 2.2 Historical development of the actors of the camp governance

Historical authorities Syria Lebanon
In 1950s and 1960s LC–GAPAR Before 1970s: Lebanese

military intelligence
In 1970s LC–GAPAR PLO
In 1980s LC–GAPAR Pro-Syrian faction and
popular committee
In 1990s LC–GAPAR Factions and popular
committee
names vary from country to country), a camp-based staff member who historically
assumes a powerful position vis-à-vis the camp community. Powers included, for
example, the ability to cut ration rolls for an individual who did not obey UNRWA
regulations. UNRWA historically appointed these officers from among the camp
community, after consultation and the verbal approval from the local tribal and vil-
lage leaders. This policy is doubly accommodating: while UNRWA is appointing
a representative of the camp’s new elite to become official staff member, UNRWA
also seeks legitimization and acceptance. From the early 1990s, UNRWA increas-
ingly appointed members of new camp elites, such as well-educated camp residents
(being engineers, instructors, pharmacists or scientists) and sometimes those known
historically by their political activism and their good relations to the community.4
In interviews, camp dwellers in Lebanon often refer to this officer as ‘camp direc-
tor’, yet in reality, his official function is merely to act as a facilitator of UNRWA
services. Interviews clearly showed the gap between his perceived role and actual
function. This confusion is not due to the refugees’ cognitive disorder but rather
stems from the historical role played by UNRWA directors in not merely providing
services but also in administering and coordinating many aspects of the refugees’
lives. As a result, ‘camp directors’ are perceived as occupying a ruling position
without acting accordingly.
The confusion over the role of camp officers is symptomatic of the confusion
over the role of UNRWA as a whole. Many camp residents, for instance, consider
32 Sari Hanafi
UNWRA and the popular committee responsible for the disorder in the camps.
Expressing her anger at their perceived passivity: ‘Who can I complain to when
my neighbor builds a second and third floor without leaving any proper space for
my apartment?’ Many interviewees indeed used the word ‘chaos’ to describe the
situation in the camps and blame UNRWA’s inaction as a major cause.
The Lebanese case: the state of exception5

I will take the new development concerning the plan for new governance of Nahr el-
Bared camp as a starting point to discuss the Lebanese authorities’ vision concerning
the Palestinian refugee camps in general. Indeed the Nahr el-Bared camp (hereafter
NBC) crisis was an opportunity to establish new relationship between Palestinian
and Lebanese authorities and has shown the weakness of traditional Palestinian
political factions in managing the crisis. The topic of governance in the camp is
commonly misrepresented and misunderstood. This is partly due to the fact that
governance practices are informal, inconsistent, changing and variable from camp
to camp. It takes the form of a multi-layered tapestry with multiple actors, groups,
individuals and factions maneuvering, competing and negotiating different aspects
of life in the camp. While it might be incomprehensible to the outside spectator,
it is a reflection of the complexity, irony and difficulty of Palestinian politics and
status of a 60-year old temporary-permanent urban refugee camp. In the case of
the NBC, the traditional actors were present: a popular committee (composed of
representatives from all political factions in principle, but in reality and historically,
the pro-Syrian coalition prevailed), neighborhood committees, an assortment of
prominent notables, religious figures and some NGOs.6
Using the ‘refugee file’ for internal use,7 the Lebanese government decided to
institute a new model of governance in the camp, based exclusively on principle
of Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF) control and surveillance, ignoring the
genuine issues of everyday life in the camp, and without consulting and dealing
with the current actors in the NBC. The NBC is also an interesting case study in
how several grassroots committees, initiatives, commissions and advocacy groups
became involved in the reconstruction, playing a bigger role in the camp’s scene.
In actuality, the crisis evidenced the weakness and ineffectiveness of traditional
factions. A special team prepared a document for the NBC donor conference in
Vienna.
The Vienna document

The Vienna conference was hosted by the Austrian government, Lebanon, the Arab
League, the UNRWA and the European Union. The Vienna document was compiled
by the Lebanese government in collaboration with the Lebanese Palestinian Dialog
Committee (LPDC), its consultants and what was to be later known as the Recovery
and Reconstruction Cell. The Vienna document compiled several technical studies
that had been prepared by the UNRWA, Nahr el-Bared Reconstruction Committee
for Civil Action and Studies, UNDP and World Bank; in addition, the firm Khatib
& Alami presented a unified and comprehensive vision for the reconstruction as
well as an estimate of total cost. In spite of Palestinian officials’ endorsement of
the document, Palestinian political representatives played only a symbolic role in
its actual preparation because of the lack of technical experts within the PLO to
conduct, co-author and prepare such a study. This vacuum was filled in part by
the various civil society initiatives, NGOs and experts who played an active role
in collection data and lobbying, used formal and informal channels as well as
participatory mechanisms. The political implication of questions of security and
governance in the document were authored entirely by the government and its
consultants in absence of any Palestinian counterpart.
The Vienna document proposes ‘establishing a transparent and effective gov-
ernance structure for Nahr el-Bared camp. This includes enforcing security and
rule of law inside NBC through community and proximity policing’ (p. 46).8 The
document explains that:
community policing in NBC context entails the presence inside the camp of
a culturally and politically sensitive ISF that will work to reduce the fears
and tensions that existed prior to and after NBC conflict. Such type of polic-
ing will promote community engagement, partnership and proactive problem
solving. The above security arrangements for NBC were agreed upon with
the Palestinian Liberation Organization. […] Building trust between the ISF
and the NBC community would encourage camp residents to be more sup-
portive and forthcoming in reporting community problems and security issues.
Police officers would engage in various types of community activities (youth
schemes, community programs, etc.) to foster a closer relationship with the
residents of the camp. A closer partnership between the ISF and the com-
munity would ultimately help make the rebuilt NBC a safer place and would
promote a successful security model for other Palestinian refugee camps in
Lebanon. The ISF police officers will be exposed to the political history of the
Palestinians refugees in Lebanon, and will be trained to better understand the
cultural and social specificities of the Palestinian community. Moreover, offic-
ers will be trained on problem solving, conflict resolution, and communications
skills.
In spite of the fact that the various Palestinian civil society entities sensed that
such a document was being prepared, it was only made public a few days before
the inauguration of the Vienna conference and it had been already printed and
distributed to donors. The Palestinian embassy received the document at the same
time as the other donors. Although the PLO objected to the concept of commu-
nity policing during an official meeting with LPDC head, then ambassador Khalil
Makkawi, a few days before the Vienna conference, no changes were made to the
document. None of the Palestinians presented an objection during the conference.
The funding for training Lebanese ISF officers, budgeted at 5 million US dollars
was pegged and the American team has started training the ISF according to the
Vienna document.
34 Sari Hanafi
The director of the Palestinian Organization for Human Rights, Ghassan Abdellah
suggested to adopt the municipal policing experience in Lebanon and to adapt it to
the human security concept. According to him:
the popular committees present in the camps would be elected directly by the
residents, linked to the neighboring municipalities and become integral parts
therein. They would also operate according to the same governance and elect-
oral regulations that rule the councils of the municipalities. Such a procedure
would put an end to the designation quotas imposed by the political factions.
The civilian police members would be selected among the residents of the
camp and would respond to the elected popular committee. Consequently, just
as it happens to the municipalities, the elected popular committees would be
ruled by the legitimate authority that is represented by the Ministry of Interior
Affairs and Municipalities. A cooperation formula might be attempted between
the representatives of the legitimate authority of the Ministry of Interior and
the civilian police of the camp – based on the human security concept and the
experience of community policing.
(Abdellah 2009: 8)
Governance reduced to security

In the Vienna conference document, the governance section is brief. It does however
clearly reflect the continuation and further development of an existing policy. It
was authored by Lebanese policy makers and their consultants without consultation
with the local community, and framed in the language of partnership and com-
munity policing. Community policing or neighborhood policing is a philosophy
and strategy based on the assumption that community interaction and support can
help control crime, with community members helping to identify suspects, detain
vandals and bring problems to the attention of police.9 If theoretically a community
policing strategy needed to be implemented, it would need the full cooperation of
the community and it cannot be forced on the community. While community polic-
ing is embedded in the discourse of improving and empowering citizenship action
and initiative, in the case of Nahr el-Bared, it was reduced to counterinsurgency
policing treating refugees to ‘security’ subjects and the camp as ‘security island’.
In fact, implementing norms, laws and practices that pertain to the citizenship
of a refugee population denied basic civil rights illustrates the dark irony of the
concept.
Extensive interviews determined that the section on governance generated a
strong and negative reaction among the local community. Moreover, a petition
addressed directly to the then Prime Minister, then Fouad Saniora, signed by hun-
dreds of the camp’s dwellers, was published two Lebanese dailies, al-Akhbar and
as-Safir on January 24, 2009. It stated clearly their rejection of the government’s
exclusive regard for security in dealing with their camp and the government’s
policy for governance. Any potential for partnership and discussion with the com-
munity in the future have been tarnished by the political implications of the Vienna
document. And finally, in spite of the fact that the Vienna document states, offi-
cially, its authorship in coordination with the PLO, effectively, there was neither
understanding nor approval for its policy proposals among the various factions of
the PLO. Only in September 2009 did the PLO show awareness when it formed a
strong team headed by Marwan Abdel-‘Al who requested the change in the rules
of game to a clear partnership.
The document answers solely to the concerns of Lebanese security bodies, in
vision and perspective. The Popular Committee, for instance, is remarkably absented
as an interlocutor to the ‘community police’. The documented glosses over the
reality that preceded the eruption of the conflict, and the various actors that played
a role, in addition to the Popular Committee, such as the Armed Struggle group,
the Security Committee, the political factions, neighborhood committees, notables,
various professional unions and local NGOs, in other words all the bodies that
interacted and competed to negotiate the public good of the camp.
Obviously, there were tremendous problems in the management of this formal
and informal form of governance that include conflict and corruption; however,
there was no ground for excluding these local actors. Creating a real Palestinian–
Lebanese partnership is based on respecting, building and developing the camp’s
local political and social structures to develop clear and transparent mechanisms
of interaction with the Lebanese and is not achievable through teaching the ISF
officers the ‘political history of the Palestinians refugees in Lebanon (and) . . . their
cultural and social specificities’, as Vienna document has formulated.
More significant is the fact that implementing security is regarded simply as
introducing a ‘new’ police force. Research on post-war reconstruction (GTZ 2004)
and actual experience reinforce the argument that the foundations for a successful
post-conflict reconstruction articulate rebuilding the spatial environment, re-starting
the economic cycle, establishing truth and reconciliation commissions and instating
principles for good governance. Only through such a holistic approach can NBC
overcome the social, political and economic challenges it faces in this post-conflict
phase and a real and sustainable Palestinian–Lebanese relationship be grounded.
Instead, the situation that preceded the conflict was maintained: arbitrary check-
points, barbed-wire fencing, controlling movement in and out of the camp requiring
permission for all Palestinian and Lebanese residents. Shortly after the battle was
concluded, the cabinet of ministers approved the building of a military base at the
edge of the old camp. In February 2009 the cabinet of ministers issued another
decree to establish a naval base on the coast of camp’s beach. And the LPDC and
ISF continue to lobby for instituting a police station inside the old camp. To draw
a clearer picture, the density of the space in question is of the highest in the world,
with 1,700 buildings squeezed into 190,000 sq. meters, housing 20,000 refugees.
There were other options, more sensible and respectful to the community, such
as locating the police station at the edge of the camp, but these were vehemently
rejected by the Lebanese government and LPDC. It almost seems as if it were a
political statement to assert their absolute authority over the camp. Other states
hosting Palestinian refugees prefer to maintain police stations at the outskirts of
camps, in Amman, for example, where, after insisting on locating stations in the
36 Sari Hanafi
center of the camp, they were eventually relocated to the periphery because of
repeated burnings by the refugees.
The Vienna conference proposal introduces unilaterally a new actor in the camp.
The principal question is why should Lebanese policing be introduced into the
camp? And why are the established conventions being over-ridden? If policing is
meant to control crime, the NBC was not a crime-infested ghetto; whatever crimes
took place were contained and the violators prosecuted. If policing is meant to
control the presence of Fatah el-Islam, then one can only wonder why the ISF
and army failed to arrest an armed militant group whose offices, bases, training
grounds and homes were predominantly based outside the camp’s boundaries, on
Lebanese territory prior to the eruption of the conflict. The point is not to inculp-
ate the Lebanese authorities in what happened, rather to highlight the fact that
the security of the camp is not the outcome of the absence of a Lebanese policing
force. One of the main problems pertaining to security and policing is the nature
and coordination mechanism of jurisdiction between Palestinian structures and the
Lebanese state with regards to the camp and its environs. Since the expiration of
the Cairo Agreement (1969), the terms of reference between the two parties have
remained ambiguous at best. The camp is a legally suspended space where military
intelligence has governed it in a state of exception.
De-legitimizing the Popular Committee

The Lebanese state’s de-legitimizing of the Popular Committee was neither new
policy nor practice; interviews with members of NBC’s Security Committee spoke
a great deal about the absence of an external political cover and how Lebanese
military intelligence treated them merely as informants and implementers of their
orders. As one of the members testified:
If any citizen from the camp was in trouble, if he had wronged someone and
the Security Committee jailed him, he would sue and would become a fugitive
of the state. I have been jailed three times by the government . . . I am working
for my people! I have no problem as long as I am serving my people. But if
the state jails me three times because of complaints, then what? Once a thief
complained about me and had me jailed.
The role of the Lebanese state in creating a security vacuum within the camp
through disempowering its local security structures is clear. Lebanese military
intelligence and the ISF used the Security Committee when they needed favors,
like delivering wanted persons for justice, but in exchange, they never gave them
the acknowledgment or resources as a local municipal power. ISF still resort to
recruiting local ‘informants’ who ultimately use their connections to the security
apparatus to exert influence and deploy intimidation. After the crisis in NBC, that
practice intensified, focusing specifically on disenfranchised youth.
However, recent fieldwork in the Ain el-Helweh, Baddawi and Nahr el-Bared
camps revealed that the absence of a legitimate popular committee was a serious
stumbling block. Historically, popular committees were dependent on the political
and financial backing of the PLO and various political factions. Since the transfer
of the PLO’s leadership from Lebanon to Tunisia in 1982, their resources have been
scarce, with the passage of time; as the camps became among the most dense urban
configurations in the world, the popular committees gradually lost their capacity
at dealing effectively with them.
The Vienna document does not mention providing resources, capacity build-
ing or assistance to re-empower popular committees. In NBC, a disempowered
popular committee can only play a symbolic role in the reconstruction, in which
a swarm of international NGOs, development agencies, United Nations agencies
and government agencies has been involved formally and directly. In February
2009, International Habitat, the Italian cooperation organization, initiated a project
of connecting the sewage system in the new camp areas of Nahr el-Bared to al-
Muhamara, the neighboring municipality. The LPDC organized several meetings
without excluding the popular committee, at the conclusion of negotiations, the
committee was invited to come and sign. They refused to do this. Community
leaders complained in interviews that several projects proposed by international
cooperation offices and organizations did not meet the list of priorities for their
camps. They were often driven by technical considerations, such as the kind of
expertise the cooperation offices have at their disposal, or their ability to disburse
only small grants that cannot cover the cost of serious infrastructure projects. In
another instance, an Italian cooperation organization proposed to provide equipment
for sanitation and waste removal to be shared by the municipality of Muhamara and
NBC’s Popular Committee. However, considering that the committee has no legal
status in Lebanese law, the contract for joint-ownership could not be drafted.10
Beyond the scarcity of means at their disposal, absence of expertise and sys-
tematic deligitimization from the Lebanese state, the Popular Committee ails from
fundamental problems at the level of representation. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s
most refugees were affiliated to political parties and movements that had more or
less democratic processes in electing their leadership; popular committees included
members from the various political groups in each camp and thus were representa-
tive of the camp’s population. Moreover, there was space allotted to unions and
to a member from a liberal profession, such as engineer or teacher. With the steep
marginalization of party politics and dramatic reduction in numbers of active party
affiliations, the committees no longer represented the camp’s population appropri-
ately, and their legitimacy was further undermined from within. Recently, there is a
committee established in the PLO offices in Beirut to reform the popular committee
in Lebanon and preliminary plan was set up for that.
A critique of security-based sovereignty

Although camps in Lebanon can be easily compared to the size of towns (varying
from 10,000 to 80,000 people), they are managed without municipal structures. In
interviews, people often used terms and words signifying arbitrariness and chaos.
‘Camps are not under the responsibility of the Lebanese state’, claimed a senior
38 Sari Hanafi
officer in the ISF. This said, while camp residents are excluded from the realm of
municipal planning and service provision, they are at same time included with
regards to questions of security and taxes.11 This paradoxical implementation of
the law is characteristic to the space of exception, specifically in uncovering how
power structures define the relationship between the space of the camp to the
space of the city. While under the Refugee Convention of 1951 have the right to
work without requiring a permit, in Lebanon, Palestinian refugees are barred from
practicing more than 70 professions, and are required a work permit even in the
case of manual labor.
After 60 years and three generations, Palestinian refugees still cannot be con-
sidered as belonging to the category of ‘foreigners’, which, in Lebanon, is usually
made up of temporary migrants. Reduced to their status as individuals in need of
shelter and food, the governance of their bare-life has been transferred to the hands
of the police and military on the one hand, and to an apolitical relief organization
such as the UNRWA, on the other hand. The Lebanese state has sustained a status
quo (of sorts) by juggling the inclusion/exclusion duality, subverting the legal with
the political and vice versa. So while Palestinian refugees are excluded from the
regime of rights and benefits and rights, they are included in the regime of security,
as subjects under permanent control and surveillance, under the guise of the writ
of law or political imperative. Moreover, the Lebanese state has endorsed inter-
national humanitarian laws, as well as Arab League decrees pertaining to human
right laws; however with regards Palestinian refugees, these laws and regulations
are at best overlooked, at worst violated. The Lebanese state implements the state
of exception by all means but specifically using the recourse to law, essentially
political questions are treated as a matter of law. When Palestinians lobbied to be
granted basic civil rights as refugees, the government claimed the question did not
pertain to the law, rather to the political construct of the country and its cautiously
gauged balance between confessional groups.
While the question of governance in the camps should be part of the responsibility
of the Lebanese state, this cannot be done without the camps’ population, organiza-
tions, committees, factions and networks. Understandably, establishing genuinely
representative bodies is not a simple ambition for a nation under occupation at home
and in a state of dispersal in various host countries. And while there are no clearly
defined solutions or models and a great deal of what exists on the ground is flawed,
there is also a rich legacy of practices within the camps that can be learned from or
used as starting points. It was hoped that after a tragedy of the scale that at NBC,
there might have been serious motivation for a sober assessment of previous (and
existing) policy and practices, and a thorough investigation into the conditions that
led to the crisis. Unfortunately, neither the LPDC nor Lebanese officialdom is will-
ing to admit the reality of institutional and legal discrimination against Palestinians.
Until Palestinians are considered equal to the Lebanese, there cannot be a real
partnership or cooperation, and the destruction of NBC would simply be another
tragic chapter of the Palestinians’ difficult presence in Lebanon.
The establishment of the LPDC in 2005 was a positive first step, after years of
conflict, to try and bridge the divide between both parties (Brynen 2009). In the
four years since 2005, however, the state has made little progress on this front.
The general dysfunction of the Lebanese state – which in these years has wit-
nessed massive demonstrations and protests, a war with Israel, sectarian violence,
a boycotted government, political infighting, a presidential vacuum and two highly
contentious cabinet formations – has prevented it from taking any initiative on the
much needed reform of its policies. Instead, it has left the Palestinians to be fed
by UNRWA and guarded by the army until such time as the parliament – the only
governmental body capable of licensing meaningful reform – sees fit to weigh in on
the issue.
Sadly, for the foreseeable future, indicators suggest that the Lebanese state will
continue excluding Palestinians from the rights and benefits they ought to enjoy
as residents of Lebanon while simultaneously including them as a security threat,
as ‘something’ to be contained and subjected to strict control and surveillance.
As a result, tensions between Lebanese and Palestinians will continue to mount,
the factions will carry on in their struggles inside the camps and these ‘spaces of
exception’ will continue to present a threat to Lebanese sovereignty and security.
This fact is what the International Crisis Group has aptly referred to in a recent
report as ‘nurturing instability’ (Atrache 2009).
In spite of this, Palestinians in Lebanon will continue to cope in remarkable
ways. By drawing from their shared history, their common experience as refugees,
the motivating force of Palestinian nationalism and by relying on strong moral and
ethical norms, which in recent years have been underpinned by Islamist discourse,
they will govern themselves in the absence of any real, legitimate government as
best they can.
The Syrian case: Yarmouk camp as space normalcy

Unlike in Lebanon, the Palestinian refugees in Syria have enjoyed the same civil
rights and services as those enjoyed by local citizens, and are more socially inte-
grated than Palestinian refugees in any other host country (Hanafi 2001). Their
presence in Syria is regulated by Law 450 issued January 25, 1949, which pro-
vides for the administration of Palestinian refugee affairs and ensures their needs
are met. This law authorized the establishment of the Palestine Arab Refugee
Institution (PARI) under the auspices of the Syrian Social Affairs and Labor
Ministry. PARI was later replaced by the Syrian General Authority for Palestine
Arab Refugee Affairs (GAPAR), also a department of the Social Affairs and Labor
Ministry.
However, one of the most important laws in Syria, Law 260 issued October 7,
1956, granted Palestinian residents nearly the same status as Syrian nationals. The
law stipulates that Palestinians living in Syria have the same duties and responsibili-
ties as Syrian citizens, though they are not granted nationality or political rights.
Palestinian refugees in Syria were granted equal rights, for example, in the areas of
education,12 owning property,13 labor and employment,14 trade and military service,
while at the same time, maintaining Palestinian nationality.
40 Sari Hanafi
Urban situation
Yarmouk is an ‘unofficial’ refugee camp in Damascus that is home to the largest
Palestinian refugee community in Syria. It is located 8 kilometers from the center
of Damascus, still inside the capital’s municipal boundaries, and has now begun
to merge into the surrounding city. As of December 2008, there were 144,312
registered refugees living in Yarmouk, comprising a quarter of the total 453,000
Palestinians in Syria, another quarter of whom live in official camps.
Living conditions in Yarmouk appear to be better than in other Palestinian refugee
camps in Syria. Residents of the camp include many white collar professionals
such as doctors, engineers and civil servants, as well as many who are employed as
casual laborers and street vendors. ‘We are a five-star camp, compared to Jaramana
and Khan Sheih camps’, explained one inhabitant of Yarmouk. The vibrant camp is
crowded not only by Palestinian inhabitants but also Iraqi migrants and refugees.
Syrians from surrounding areas add to the bustle, seeking bargains at fancy clothes
boutiques. One said: ‘Here you can buy bridal clothes for half the price of what
you find in Souk al-Hamadiyya and Salhiyya [two shopping areas in downtown
Damascus].’
Over time, refugees living in Yarmouk have improved and expanded their resi-
dences, adding rooms. According to a 2003 Fafo survey,15 90 per cent of Yarmouk
residents live in apartments (Jacobson 2006) and market rates for real estate in
Yarmouk camp (for 2005) were 2,400 SP ($490) (Jacobson 2006: 35), which was
comparable to rates in rural areas. Only 8 percent of apartments are rented.
Cement block buildings and narrow streets typify the layout of this densely
crowded camp. The average family size is 4.4 members and 12 percent of the
households are ‘objectively crowded’, defined by Gove and Hughes (1983: xvii) as
habitats with at least three individuals per room. However, interviewees expressed
a feeling of intense subjective crowding (one’s perception of not having enough
space in the home) because there are no parks or playgrounds in the camp. Indeed,
the streets are the children’s playground, making the neighborhood very noisy.
There are three main roads running through the camp, each lined with shops and
crammed with service taxis and microbuses. Moreover, Yarmouk has also become
home to thousands of newly arrived Iraqi refugees.
Actors of governance: the local committee as a major actor

The main actor of governance in the Yarmouk camp is the municipality (baladiyya),
which is like any municipality but with two major exceptions: first, some of the
urban regulations applied to the camp are different of surrounding municipalities;
second, the body is unelected and under the heavy control of the Ba’ath Party. The
Yarmouk baladiyya is governed by a local committee. For political reasons, this
local committee is under supervision of the GAPAR, whose General Director has
been the president of the committee. After 1989, the president was nominated by the
Ministry of Local Administration and the whole committee came under its tutelage
. However the General Director of GAPAR maintains his power of nominating
members of the local committee after approval by the Palestinian Commandant
of Baath Party (al-kyada al-qotriyya al-falastiniyya). It is worth mentioning that
the label of baladiyya exists only at the Yarmouk camp – other refugee camps in
Syria have only a GAPAR office, which coordinates its work with UNRWA and
the surrounding municipalities.
The local committee members are selected from camp dwellers, either Ba’athist
or close to the Syrian regime, and usually have a university degree. The current
local committee, for example, is composed of five engineers, a lawyer and a teacher.
This new elite, called ‘neck tie elite’ by Yasmine Bouagga (2008), is very different
from the traditional elite, the wajahat (notables) and the mukhtars. From these seven
members, five are Ba’athists and the two independents are chosen by the Baath Party.
Historically, the head of the municipality is accountable only to the Director
of GAPAR, but since there is the problem of corruption in this baladiyya, the
governorate (muhafazeh) of Damascus is supervising the work of the local com-
mittee. Its main source of funds comes from the Ministry of Local Affairs and from
baladiyya taxation.
Except for some anomalies, the camp is constructed according to a master plan.
As such, it is also well connected to the Syrian infrastructure, including the sewage,
water, electricity and telecommunication systems. The municipality has carried out
many infrastructure projects including roadway and sidewalk renovations, street
lighting and maintaining green spaces. The construction of a new cemetery is over-
seen by an ad hoc baladiyya committee in order to find funding to buy the land.
Palestinian factions such as Fatah and Hamas are providing the bulk of the funds,
while the remainder is being sought from the business community.
Contrary to other camps in Syria or elsewhere, the presence of the Syrian state
is very clear in Yarmouk, detected not only through symbols (such as posters,
presidential portraits of Asad, flags, etc.) but also through the state’s interven-
tion in all aspects of life in the camps. In 1996, the Ministry of Culture opened
an Arab Cultural Center in the camp. It is significant that the Yarmouk camp has
such a center, like those of other residential neighborhoods. Similarly, there are
nine Syrian secondary schools i.e. they are dependent on the Syrian ministry of
education (Fadhel 2008).
As it has in other camps, GAPAR mandated a Committee of Social Development
in Yarmouk in 2005, but it is hardly active. Effectively, the baladiyya is replacing
the function of this committee, while in other camps in Syria, this committee has
a much more crucial role.
Interviewees expressed satisfaction with the functioning of the Yarmouk munici-
pality. They wished the local committee was elected and not appointed but they were
also realistic with their expectations. One young medical doctor said: ‘In any case,
Syrian local elections are also very controlled by the Baath Party. Independents are
filtered before being accepted as candidates.’
Some accused local committee members of being corrupt or just ‘looking out
for themselves’, arguing that some construction permits have been granted that
were against the municipality regulations. In fact, two former heads of the local
committee ended up in prison on charges of corruption.
42 Sari Hanafi
Minor actors
There are other actors that are investing in the social and political space but not
really playing an administrative role in the camp. These will now be discussed.
UNRWA plays a major role providing services for the camp, but is not really
involved with issues of governance. UNRWA’s camp officer (in Arabic modir
al-mokhyam – camp director), for example, is not really known to the public, mak-
ing Yarmouk very different from other camps in Syria and elsewhere. However,
the presence of UNRWA’s services in the camp is very important. With regard to
education, UNRWA has 28 double-shifted schools, operating in 14 school build-
ings and accommodating 23,438 pupils. It also has three health centers providing
24,639 patient consultations per month, and a food distribution center for the special
harsh cases. UNRWA’s Social Safety Net (SSN) program has benefited 17,470
individuals (6,464 families) and just last June, a Microcredit Community Support
Program began operating in the camp. UNRWA also sponsors women’s centers
and community rehabilitation centers.
In contrast to UNRWA, which has historically recycled the old notability and has
given them a leading role in the camp management in other fields (Gaza and West
Bank), the Syrian authorities have been rather interested in creating a new elite, as
we will see later on. The Syrians have used only extended family leaders for the
function of mokhtar, which is often an officer who knows people, but has mostly a
bureaucratic role without any significant power. This does not mean that the tribal
and extended family structure does not exist. In May 2009, a man (originally from
Ja’ouneh) was killed by someone from another neighborhood after the two had
engaged in a dispute. The murder led to quarrelling between the two communities,
prompting the Syrian police to intervene and maintain a heavy presence in the
area for a month in order to protect the people living in the killer’s neighborhood
(Safouriyya neighborhood) from possible reprisals. Such events are really rare
in Yarmouk, as one policeman reported. Our interlocutors were surprised to find
such a tribal solidarity suddenly revived in the camp. With poverty rates constantly
increasing, the resulting instability and threatening circumstances cause kinship to
take on new meaning. Mokhtars and religious sheikhs have played a leading role
in relieving the tension, as we will see later on.
The PLO’s popular organizations are also actors in the camp, also playing a minor
role in governance. The Palestinian General Women’s Union was established in
1972 and local committees convened in each of the refugee camps. After the 1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Union provided relief assistance (food, clothing
and shelter) to Palestinians who fled Lebanon and came to the camps in Damascus.
In 1983, the Palestinian dissident factions in Syria gradually took over from the
outlawed Fateh and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and
established a ‘new union’ in the Yarmouk camp. However, the dissident factions
enjoyed limited popular support (Brand 1988: 634).
The Syrian branch of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) is located in
Yarmouk. It runs eight primary health care centers, three outpatient clinics and three
hospitals, and provides services to registered and non-registered Palestinians, as
well as to Syrians who are unable to afford health care. The PRCS also provides
some social services, such as marketing refugees’ handicrafts (embroidery), finding
Palestinians employment opportunities and providing some vocational training for
women (PRCS Syria branch 2003 overview report).
Palestinian factions are granted a restricted space for activism in the Syrian con-
text, outside of the legal context, with the aim of intervening in intra-Palestinian
political affairs inside and outside Syria, though this permissiveness is not equal
for all factions. The Vanguard for the Popular Liberation War (al-Sa’iqa), as part
of the Baath Party, is given full operating space, while Hamas, Islamic Jihad and
Palestinian dissident factions (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and Fatah Uprising) are given much less,
followed by the most restricted leftist organizations (PFLP, DFLP and the People’s
Party). As for Fatah, Syrian authorities have required them to keep a low profile.16
Leaders of Palestinian factions complained that the youth are disinterested in joining
their factions and many young interviewees confirm that.
The PLO has kept some popular organizations relatively active in Syria, such as
the Palestinian Youth Organization, the Palestinian Scout Association. The Syrian
branch of the General Union of Palestine Workers (GUPW), which was founded
in 1965, is not really active – it mainly just participates, with other Palestinian and
Syrian unions, in celebrations or national festivities.
The case of the Yarmouk camp shows that camps are not, per se, extra-territorial
or subversive sites out of the state’s bounds, and neither do they inherently pose
security threats. It is only when Palestinian refugees are subject to systemic discrimi-
nation and urban marginalization that their communities have become problematic
from a security point of view.
Syrian authority ensures formal and necessary structures of governance in the
Yarmouk camp – structures that replaced the traditional elite composed of wajih (clan
leaders) and sheikhs. Yarmouk camp is now part and parcel of the social fabric of
Damascus. Even as the Yarmouk camp continues to display distinct administrative,
social, demographic, political and economic features, its boundaries are increasingly
blurred. The spatial integration of the camp with its surroundings became easier
because of the general social and economic integration of the wider Palestinian
community into Syrian society. For instance, marriages between Yarmouk camp
dwellers and Syrians are not rare. Integration occurred because of enabling Syrian
policies, societal acceptance of the refugees and because of Palestinians’ proactive
efforts to insert themselves into their hosts’ urban, social and economic spheres.
But what about the political space?
In Syria, like in Jordan and Egypt, Palestinians experience numerous difficulties
when attempting to participate in political activities and are widely considered
to be interfering in internal and local affairs. Mourid Barghouthi noted in his
biography that:
the stranger is the person who renews his Resident Permit. He fills out forms
and buys the stamps for them. He has come up with evidence and proofs. He
does not care for the details that concern the people of the country where he
44 Sari Hanafi
finds himself or for their ‘domestic’ policy. But he is the first to feel its conse-
quences. He may not rejoice in what makes them happy but he is always afraid
when they are afraid. He is always an ‘infiltrating element’ in demonstrations,
even if he never left his house that day.
(Barghouthi 2003: 3)
However, in Syria (like in Lebanon and Jordan), the second Intifada has been the
occasion for some Palestinian organizations to mobilize the Palestinian population
in those countries.
Hamas: an Islamic governmentality17

So far this chapter has focused on the actors of institutional governance, whether
they are a real sovereign or a phantom one (UNRWA) in both Lebanon and Syria.
However, the absence of a formal structure of governance in Lebanon and the authori-
tarian nature of the state in Syria has encouraged other forms of governmentality.
In Lebanon, after the departure of the PLO leadership in 1982, the existing
popular and security committees were almost completely disabled by the Syrian–
Lebanese military intelligence apparatus and replaced with pro-Syrian committees,
which were weak, considered illegitimate and were virtually without their own
financial resources. They were not permitted to develop their own effective police
programs or to participate in legitimate security functions. Regarding the day-to-
day regulation of behavior, therefore, camp residents resorted to new, informal and
alternative structures of governance, self-policing and auto-conditioning to keep
the peace and preserve order.
The conservative Islamic environment of the camps, coupled with constant
policing and surveillance by the factions, has thus far succeeded in deterring most
of the sorts of crime that one might find in a similarly impoverished Lebanese
neighborhood, though at the same time, it also seems to have enabled some of
the factions themselves to commit other sorts of crimes. For example, as Nahr el-
Bared residents are keen to point out, their society accepted Fatah al-Islam in their
midst for several months, because the group appeared pious and was effective in
preventing crime and promoting good Islamic behavior: ‘The camp is fertile ground
and if you throw a seed there, it will grow on its own. The camp and the religious
environment that the sheikhs talk about exists, and the conservative environment
tends to dislike crime.’
Even more telling, however, were the words of one sheikh in the camp:
I am one of those who approved of some of the accomplishments of Fatah

al-Islam, when you consider dealing with the drunkards and the fact that our
girls could come and go without anyone misbehaving with them. All this was
positive.
Many witnesses in NBC confirmed that some imams condoned the presence of
Fatah al-Islam in the camp during their Friday sermons. For example, after two
clashes between the population and Fatah al-Islam fighters in the spring of 2007,
at least two imams interceded on behalf of Fatah al-Islam, as they were ‘pious
faithful people’, reported residents. Islamist movements are, to some extent, wel-
comed in the camps for their ability to preserve the social order in the absence of
other regulatory authorities. Because no Palestinian authority recognized by both
Palestinians and Lebanese as legitimate and sovereign exists, Palestinians have
been forced to adopt alternative – but less effective – ways of maintaining order
in the camps. This phenomenon should be seen in parallel with the revival of a
conservative Sunni Islam, also in recent years, in Lebanese cities neighboring the
camps. In both Tripoli, near Nahr el-Bared and Beddawi, and in Sidon, near ‘Ayn
al-Hilweh, groups such as Al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya, the Muslim Brotherhood and
several locally established Salafist groups have been competing with municipal
authorities, and to a lesser extent, with secular camp leaders, for bases of social
support. One youth from Beddawi commented on this:
There are schools in Tripoli, and there are many students from the camp who study
at these schools, such as Al-Hidaya al-Islamiyya of Sheikh Abdullah al-Shahhal
and Al-Sahab Islamic Foundation, the schools of the Muslim Brotherhood, and
the Islamic University, which has now shifted to Hamas’s control.
These new manifestations of a conservative and urban Islam in Lebanon, in such

close proximity to the camps, have made a distinct impression on many Palestinians.
By welcoming camp residents into their midst socially, by accepting Palestinians
in their religious colleges and by popularizing conservative Saudi satellite media
such as Irqa, Al-Majd and Al-Nass in their geographical locales, these actors have
provided many Palestinians with new frames of reference to discuss their situations.
As a result, more and more Palestinians have begun to turn to Islamic authorities
rather than to the PLO or other political authorities for answers to their questions and
for assistance. For example, as one focus group participant observed: ‘Regarding
matters of marriage, divorce and problems between neighbors, even problems on
a political level – all these have witnessed involvement by the imams of mosques,
who have played a role in calming things down.’
Unable to turn to municipal or larger Palestinian authorities to solve their prob-
lems, camp residents have been compelled to seek mediation in highly individualized
ways such as these. Camp residents have begun to rely more on shared notions
of morality and ethics – particularly, Islamic ones (akhlaq) – to promote norms
for acceptable behavior. As a result, sheikhs, imams, and other ‘morally sound’
persons, like the wujaha’, have been granted much of the authority that, 20 years
prior, belonged to secular political organizations such as the PLO.
In Syria, politics is monopolized by the state (Wedeen 1999: 45), with the Baath
Party ensuring the de-politicization of the population, especially the Islamists.
In this context, it is not easy for a Palestinian faction such as Hamas to carry out
political activities. But the regime and the Islamist faction have made a clear deal:
as long as Hamas politics conforms to Syrian foreign policy, Hamas is afforded
political space (Blin 2008: 48). Hamas mobilizes a community of believers through
mosques to financially support its actions of resistance and assistance to Palestinians
46 Sari Hanafi
under occupation. This effort has borne some fruit, as Syrian businesspeople have
shown their generosity toward Hamas. Moreover, despite Hamas’ arrangement with
the Syrian authorities, Hamas still plays a role in framing the Islamist opposition
outside the camps (Blin 2008: 59). Syrian citizens now attend Hamas rallies and
festivities inside the Yarmouk camp. Indeed, the camp has become a central place
in Syrian internal politics.
However, Hamas primarily invests its limited political capital through social
channels, rather than overtly political ones. As a result, while the municipality
manages the camp, Islamic governmentality occupies the social arena. Hamas’
social power extends not only to a fundamental (i.e. moral and world-view) level,
but also in more concrete terms in the form of real control and surveillance. Hamas
and the official Syrian brand of Islam (promoted through channels such as the Assad
Institute for Memorialization of the Quran) have thereby become the major actors
in such governmentality.
Hamas is not only a movement of national liberation but also of religious
re-socialization (Le Grand, cited by Blin 2008). For instance, Hamas regularly
sponsors mass weddings. At one recent Yarmouk ceremony, 382 couples were wed.
Palestinian grooms wore religious scarves and held Palestinian flags as they sat
together before 10,000 attendees. Such weddings aim to help young couples deal
with high marriage expenses that force many to delay matrimony.
In both countries, Syria and Lebanon, Hamas has also created organizations that
parallel the PLO’s popular committee and many PLO-sponsored activities. In this
sense, specific interpretations of Islam – not just shari‘a but also ikhlaq (morals)
– appear to have begun to function as ‘mentalities of governance’, or governmentali-
ties, for camp residents. Anthropologist Michael Jensen, in conducting fieldwork
on a Hamas soccer team in Gaza, observed how ‘the creation of sound Muslims at
the individual level’ was accomplished through the physical conditioning of one’s
body through sport; it was this ‘care of the self’ that marked one as an Islamist
(Jensen 2009: 5). The soccer players with whom Jensen interacted also adopted
new styles of dress and new ways of talking about themselves, morally distinct
from other Palestinians in Gaza.
It is, as Rose reminds us, ‘through self-reformation, therapy, techniques of body
alteration, and the calculated reshaping of speech and emotion, we adjust ourselves
by means of the techniques propounded by experts of the soul’ (Rose 1990: 10).
Islamism, as articulated by Hamas, literally as a science of the soul, has transformed
the way many Palestinians, especially young men, construct their sense of self. It
has brought to the forefront the idea that an ‘economy of morals’ can order socie-
ties in the absence of traditional hierarchies. The accumulation of moral capital
thus becomes a way of standing out, of setting oneself apart from one’s peers and
ultimately even a way of commanding respect and authority in the camp.
Conclusion: three models of governance

In this chapter, I posited two general theses. First, while in Syria, the state has nor-
malized the space-camp and has treated it as any residential area, in Lebanon, there
is an endemic crisis of governance in Palestinian refugee camps. Rampant faction-
alism, clientelism, sectarian strife, oppressive Lebanese security and surveillance
and a lack of central administrative and juridical Palestinian authority continue to
prevent Palestinians from establishing effective governance structures. Second, in
this near-absence of conventional governance, alternative governmentalities have
emerged among camp populations, which to a remarkable degree, have succeeded
in regulating camp residents’ behavior. I contended that these governmentalities
have helped ensure the daily functioning of the camps and have contributed to the
rise and spread of Islamism.
Hamas governmentality is the main Islamic governmentality in the camps but not
the only one. Yarmouk and Ayn al-Hilweh camps were also one of the niches from
which Zarqawi in Iraq recruited his fighters, as Fatah al-Islam did later. However,
these recruits did not necessarily believe in global jihadi ideology embodied by
al-Qaeda, but rather adopted new modes of action and tactics. Our interviews
with some men who fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq showed clearly that they oppose
the American project in the region and not Western values. These marginalized,
educated, (lower) middle-class individuals – not of the disenfranchised poor – are
mainly only loosely tied to al-Qaeda or merely sympathetic to its ideas. In other
words, a protracted defeated context intertwined with a conservative Islam widely
disseminated through Saudi TV channels, the influence of the mosques and the
political discourse of Islamist groups (including Hamas and Jihad) all constitute a
backdrop that enables an easy shift from regular citizen to insurgent for a global
cause, fighting Israeli-American domination in the region.
This chapter has shown rather three models of camps governmentalities: the nor-
malization of the Syrian camps versus a presence model of exclusion and absence
of the formal governance in Lebanese camps and the more subtle future model of
governance based in the sophisticated form of control and surveillance.
In Syria, in spite of the fact that camps are considered and perceived by the
official discourse of Syrian authority as a distinct political entity, the same author-
ity has unofficially acceded to the camp’s spatial normalization, a de facto reality
demonstrated by the residents’ everyday life. This does not mean that Palestinians
in Yarmouk have abandoned their ties with Palestine or their claim of the right
of return. Walls in this camp are covered in iconography referring to Palestine,
martyrdom and the resistance. Khadija Fadhel (2008) talked about the double
games of actors, be they Syrian or Palestinian. That Yarmouk is not technically an
‘official’ camp is an example of how the game is played. This double game is bet-
ter expressed in how the Syrian authority labels Palestinians’ Syrian identification
cards ‘temporary ID for unlimited period.’ This does not mean that Palestinians in
Syria feel what Cambrézy (2001) called ‘temporal incertitude’. Social actors that
we interviewed read the power structure in the region perfectly well. While they
continue to claim the right of return, they are establishing themselves in the camp
as if it were their permanent dwelling.
In Lebanon to understand the presence and the future model of governance, I
will draw upon the work of Foucault (1995: 198–200) and Shamir (2009). Foucault
invokes two modalities of power that rose between the seventeenth and the end of
48 Sari Hanafi
eighteenth centuries in response to the treatment of lepers and the plague. Leprosy
was treated by the logic of segregation, exclusion and ‘great confinement’. Lepers
were excluded from the city and locked away in leper colonies through laws and
regulations and rendered invisible through ‘exile enclosure’ and left to their deaths
in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate. In contrast, as a contagious
disease that spreads rapidly and kills many people, the plague set off new forms of
response, based on spatial partitioning, i.e. multiple separations and individualizing
treatment. Quarters, streets and housing were under close scrutiny, surveillance
and control. Each resident should present themselves to inspectors. Segmentation
prompted the rise of bio-politics where statistics aid governments in refining control
and surveillance techniques. Both the separation of lepers and the segmentation
from the plague are techniques from the Middle Ages, but unfortunately they persist
in modern treatment of ‘undesirable’ populations. Refugee camps in Lebanon are
treated a spaces needing surveillance, as well as spaces of exception and exclu-
sion. Nowadays area is ordered, divided and managed by strict enclosures. The
new governance model, which is based primarily on counterinsurgency policing
the camp, is a way of treating the camp like a plague-stricken city in the Middle
Ages. Governance becomes a way of moving from a leper stricken-city where
the affected should be invisible to a state of hyper-visibility, where everyone is a
potential suspect who will be registered when they enter and watched while inside
the camp.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Issam Fares Institute at American University of Beirut
who provided the funding for this research. Special thanks to Nizar Chaaban for
conducting part of the interviews in Nahr el-Bared.
Notes
1 For more details about the articulation of the two levels of governance see Hanafi and
Long (2010).
2 Some CBOs are mainly youth centers, women’s centers as well as rehabilitation centers
for people with disabilities. They were created by UNRWA in the 1980s but now are
quasi-financially independent.
3 In many camps, the social role of NGOs is much more important than that of the
political factions. However, some of these NGOs are connected to the political factions.
Interviewees reported a climate of mistrust towards the NGOs. Meanwhile, Hamas is
increasingly playing a social role in the camps.
4 However, fearing the Israeli reaction, in the Palestinian Territory UNRWA avoid appoint-
ing people marked politically.
5 Some parts of this section have been co-authored written with Ismael Sheikh Hassan
see Hanafi and Sheikh Hasan (2009).
6 These NGOs included: a community-managed women’s program center, a youth center
and a number of NGOs active in Nahr el-Bared, including Al-Najda, Beit Atfal al-
Sumud, Ghassan Kanafani Cultural Foundation, the Khaldieh National Association and
Community-based Rehabilitation Programme for the disabled.
7 See Knudsen (Chapter 6, this volume).
8 In addition document requests donor funds (to the amount of 5 million US dollars) for
‘capacity building and technical assistance to the (Lebanese) Internal Security Forces
(ISF) aimed at introducing community and proximity policing into NBC’ (p. 48).
9 For more details see http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/community-policing/neighbourhood-
policing/?version=3 (accessed February 24, 2010).
10 Eventually, the popular committee refused to be part of that project. The major reason
was the conviction that such projects were designed to undermine them and empower
the municipality.
11 Palestinians are subject to many taxes related to trade and employment like other
Lebanese.
12 Although most Palestinians receive their primary and preparatory education at UNRWA
schools, they continue their secondary school education in Syrian government schools.
Enrolment in Syrian universities and institutes is open to Palestinians, who are treated
like Syrians (Brand 1988: 623).
13 Palestinian refugees in Syria have the right to own more than one business or com-
mercial enterprise as well as the right to lease properties. These rights extend to trade
and commerce. Membership in professional associations and labor unions is also open
to Palestinians.
14 Palestinians do not require work permits – they may work in the government, and men
must undertake military service (in the Palestine Liberation Army under the Syrian
Command).
15 Fafo has cooperated with the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Syria (PCBS-
Damascus, which is under the authority of the PCBS-Ramallah) on research on
Palestinian refugees in Syria. A multi-topic household survey in all refugee camps and
a number of other areas where Palestinian refugees reside was carried out in 2003.
16 Syria’s 1976 intervention in Lebanon led to clashes between the PLO and the Syrian
military forces in Lebanon, and in 1983, Syria attempted to control almost all the
Palestinian factions but specifically Fatah.
17 Part of this section has been written with Taylor Long (see Hanafi and Long 2010).
3 Palestinian camp refugee
identifications
A new look at the ‘local’ and the
‘national’
Rosemary Sayigh
Introduction
The term ‘identity’ has been much used in studies of Palestinians. After the
Resistance movement emerged in the late 1960s, Palestinian national identity pos-
sessed such forceful self-evidentiality that scholars tended to take it for granted,
and to neglect what might be contained within, or suppressed by, the powerful new
‘Palestinianism’. Given the Israeli drive to erase the Palestinians as a people with a
history and a territory, re-constructing a strong form of Palestinian identity from its
pre-1948 latency seemed as necessary in academic writing as it was on the political
level. In retrospect it is clear that assumptions of the homogeneity and stability of
a Palestinian national identity ignored its original pluralism, variation introduced
by diaspora and – most importantly – change over time in reaction to crisis at the
local or national level. Such neglect deflected attention from other identities con-
tained within the dominant national one, not only forms that preceded the Nakba,
such as attachment to locality,1 but also new ones arising out of exile, for example
Resistance group affiliations. Assumptions of the stability of ‘Palestinianism’ left
little space for considering divergences produced by prolonged dispersion, whether
through shifts in the international or Arab environment of the Resistance movement,
changes in leadership policies, the emergence of new Resistance factions (e.g.
Hamas) or the paralysis of national representative institutions such as the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian National Council (PNC).
The starting point of this chapter is that the term ‘identity’ as used by activists
and scholars is problematic theoretically and politically. Theoretically it assumes
a degree of unification that does not exist. Politically it gives a false assurance
of unity that contributes its share to the current crisis in the national movement.
Shorn of such assurance, activists would feel pressured to build programmes to
reconstruct identification as Palestinians, and give this identification a more demo-
cratic, more socially inclusive substance. Whereas the PLO (established in 1964)
unified and mobilized Palestinians throughout the diaspora and class spectrum, the
post-Oslo leadership has weakened the PLO as a unifying and representative body,
reinforcing separation between diasporic regions, Resistance group affiliations
and socio-economic interests. The largest population sector, the diaspora refugees,
remains outside the National Authority (NA) framework, hence it is disenfranchised
Palestinian camp refugee identifications 51
(Aruri 2001; Gassner 2001). Moreover the class gap between the political elite
and the people of, or from, the camps has widened since 1995. Though the idea
of a common national identity still possesses a certain unifying force, it no longer
mobilizes for common aims or struggle. In this situation, alternative vehicles of
popular nationalism become strategically important. The ‘local’ may express the
‘national’ more persistently than the political leadership; local communities may
take on the role of giving substance to a largely rhetorical ‘Palestinianism’.2
Historically, a strong attachment to locality of origin characterizes Palestinian
refugees in general, evidenced by home visits whenever circumstances permit
(Sayigh 2005). Among camp populations this attachment has remained especially
strong, partly because of the initial re-assembly of family- and locality-based units
when camps were first set up (al-Hajj ‘Ali 2007), and because of the marginality
of camp refugees in the host societies. At the same time attachments to individual
camps have formed over the four or five generations that exile has lasted, show-
ing up in the publication of camp histories.3 Specific conditions in each of the
regions where camps exist (the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon) have also
given rise to a ‘Palestinianism’ strongly coloured by regional specificity.4 Within
Palestinian nationalism, Resistance group affiliation has produced identifications
that have been described as ‘like membership of a family’, generating often violent
competition. Perhaps the most serious divergence in Palestinian identification is the
‘insider’/‘outsider’ boundary produced by the Oslo Accords, since this introduces a
concrete difference of interests that previously was merely latent. The contemporary
split between secular nationalists and Islamists poses a further challenge to the idea
of a dominant and unifying Palestinian identity.
Identification matters because an unachieved nationalism is likely to repress alter-
native group identifications that could contribute to an open and pluralist society.
We can discern two models of socio-political schemata where national liberation
movements are concerned, the ‘bounded/organicist’ and the ‘open/pluralist’.5 The
PLO’s early adoption of ‘democratic centralism’ as an organizing template com-
mitted a future Palestinian society to the ‘organicism’ model, with its tendency
towards the control rather than representation of subaltern groups.6 Though the
PLO included in its structure ‘popular organizations’ such as the Workers’ Union,
these bodies were controlled by a central office. Periodic elections of the unions’
administrative committees were managed according to the ‘quota’ system represent-
ing the Resistance groups, regardless of their membership size, and giving Fateh
priority (Hilal 1993: 53). After the PLO’s evacuation from Lebanon in 1982, these
frameworks of popular activism declined because of lack of public funds and the
distancing of the PLO leadership in Tunis (Hilal 1993: 50–1). The ‘democratic cen-
tralist’ model was retained after Oslo while being de-activated at the popular level.
Inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) the space between individual
voters and the NA was virtually emptied of all collectivities except the Legislative
Council and licensed non-governmental organizations (NGOs), while formations
that had played a central mobilizing role in the First Intifada were dismantled
(Hilal 1993: 54). Arafat reduced the PLO to an office in Ramallah without real
functions, and in 1997 dissolved the popular unions. Thus the sequels to the Oslo
52 Rosemary Sayigh
Accords left Palestinians outside the West Bank/Gaza Strip with merely symbolic
representation (Nabulsi 2006: 7, 8).
However understandable during the liberation struggle, prioritization of the
national contains the danger of post-independence dictatorship, one-party rule or
state patronage under the cover of elections (Brynen 1995). The more difficult a
national struggle is, the more the national is emphasized, and the less likely it is to
include social justice, popular representation or group rights among its aims. Such
regimes are difficult to reform precisely because they inherit the legitimacy of
national struggle. Studies of Third World liberation struggles have shown that after the
establishment of a state, collectivities formed during the struggle are often sidelined
or incorporated into the state in ways that deprive them of independence.7
It is within this vista that the concept of ‘group rights’ takes on political as well
as theoretical importance. ‘Group rights’ may be seen as a stronger guarantee of
post-liberation social justice than the always-transgressed liberal promise of indi-
vidual citizen rights (Isin and Wood 1999: 67–9). The concept of ‘group rights’
invokes a recognition of the rights to representation of collectivities intermediate
between the individual and the state, besides those conventionally recognized as
forming ‘civil society’. Groups self-formed through struggles for redistribution or
recognition (ranging from independent unions to heterodox sexualities) need to be
admitted into the future nation to protect it from an excessive and narrowly focused
nationalism that lends itself to leadership manipulation. The theory of ‘group rights’
goes beyond neo-liberal notions of ‘group interests’ to embrace identifications that
express class, ethnic, gender or other subalternities. In political terms, the ‘group
rights’ concept offers a counter to self-appointed, self-reproducing elites.8
An attempt to differentiate between categories of the Palestinian refugee is called
for here. Discarding classic definitions of the ‘refugee’ as one who seeks sanctuary
beyond national borders, as well as the legal definition of the ‘Palestinian refugee’
adopted in UN discourse (Takkenberg 1998), we may discriminate between all
those who were expelled outside the borders of what in 1948 became Israel – more
appropriately termed ‘expellees’ – and that sub-set of ‘expellees’ compelled by
dependence on aid to seek the shelter of camps that were located inside as well as
outside historic Palestine. A related category consists of the ‘internally displaced
persons’ who remained inside that part of Palestine that became Israel during the
expulsions of 1948, but were not allowed to return to their homes.9 While we cannot
speak of either category of ‘refugee’ as a class, camp-based refugees are separated
by limitations of status and opportunity from those whom we may name ‘diasporic
refugees’, freed by initial material or symbolic resources for a wider mobility in
terms of space and social status. Most diasporic refugees now have alternatives
citizenships, professional employment and are more or less integrated into host
societies. In socio-economic status, they range from middle class to wealthy, while
in terms of subjective identification they tend towards a cosmopolitanism coloured
by variants of ‘Palestinianism’. In camps, average incomes are lower than that
both for host society nationals and for Palestinians living outside camps. Beyond
poverty, however, camp Palestinians are subject to stereotyping, social exclusion
and limited social mobility. Marked by the stigma of dependence, camp residence
raises quasi-class barriers between Palestinians and ‘host’ populations even when
they share national identity, as in the West Bank and Gaza. Camp-based Palestinians
tend to identify themselves simply as ‘Palestinian’.10
This chapter will put forward three kinds of evidence for an emergent national–
local, status-group identification based in camp residence: (1) testimonies from two
camps under attack and siege, one in Lebanon (Shatila, May–June 1985), the other
in the West Bank (Jenin, March–April 2002); (2) examples of ‘self-organization’
from camps in the West Bank and Lebanon; and (3) recorded group discussions in
Palestinian communities carried out in 2004–5 (Nabulsi 2006). I will suggest from
this evidence that camp-based refugees form a distinct element within national
resistance, a collectivity with a latent group-consciousness that overlaps with, but
is distinct from, the larger ensemble of diasporic refugees. From here I will argue
that the cultural and practical characteristics of this ‘local–national’ offers crucial
support to the ‘national’ in times of crisis such as the present, and that camp refu-
gees have ‘group rights’ – even if still not fully articulated – that entitle them to
representation in national institutions, in settlement negotiations and in a future
Palestinian polity.
Camps as the basis of identification: siege records11
Shatila camp
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 left the Palestinian camps subject to three
different military–political forces: the Israeli army in the South, the Syrian army
in the North and Bekaa, and the Lebanese army in the larger Beirut area. After the
expulsion of the Lebanese army from West Beirut in February 1984 by a coalition
of sectarian militias – the Druze-based PSP, Shi’ite-based Amal and Sunni-based
Murabitoun – the camps of Beirut came under the control of this coalition (Sayigh
1994: 125–56). In April 1985 Amal disposed of the Murabitoun in a brief battle
and in mid-May, on the first day of Ramadan, it launched a surprise attack against
the Shatila and Daouk camps, just outside the border of the Beirut municipality.12
The people of the camp had no expectation of a military offensive and received
no ultimatum. There were no heavy or medium weapons in the camps, no public
stocks of food or medical supplies, nothing but what small stores and individual
households might contain. For defence, there were just a few semi-trained civilian
fighters. This state of unpreparedness, lack of trained Resistance group fighters
and slightness of communication with outside leaderships distinguished the Siege
of Ramadan from the others that followed.
The small unofficial camp of Daouk (often referred to as ‘Sabra’) was soon
overrun, but Shatila camp people living nearby managed to fight off the attackers
in spite of the camp’s small size (less than one square kilometre) and its exposure
to snipers and Army artillery on higher ground. From the narratives of the siege
there emerges a sense of a ‘people’s victory’, based on resourcefulness, community
solidarity and ‘Palestinianism’. One who testified was Abu Mustafa, a member of
the camp’s popular committee:
54 Rosemary Sayigh
All our fighters were sons of the camp, young men who hadn’t been trained in
the time of the Resistance, 80 per cent schoolboys who hadn’t held a Klashin
in their hands before, the reserves of the reserves. . . . Most of the arms we
used we took from the enemy. They shelled us with 120mm artillery shells.
Some didn’t explode. The shabab would take out the detonator and use them
against the attackers. We didn’t have artillery; instead we used liquid gas
containers with home-made detonators. . . . The battle succeed in unifying our
ranks in the camp. There was no son of Fatah, no son of the Popular Front or
Democratic Front. Everyone was fighting for himself and his camp. . . . We
weren’t expecting this confrontation, we lacked many of the most necessary
things. This forced us to invent new ways of struggle. We used bedspreads and
pillow covers to make sandbags. We needed cotton for wounds so we took it
from pillow cases. We couldn’t take our martyrs out for burial, we used the
mosque as a cemetery. . . . It was like the Paris Commune.
(Sayigh 1994: 236–8)
It is striking that Abu Mustafa, himself a Resistance group cadre, picks out the
absence of factional competition for praise and underlines that ‘everyone was fight-
ing for himself and the camp’. In another context, he described how refugees from
Shatila ‘are drawn to return to the camp, and to stay among familiar people and
customs. The camp is our only country’ (Sayigh 1994: 278). The trope of ‘camps as
Palestine’ is common among the more politicized, more militant element of camp
populations, in opposition to emigration aspirations. As a concept it connects camps
across borders and forms a central element in a latent camp-identification we can
hear even when overlaid by ‘official’ nationalist discourse.
Civilians played an essential a part in the defence of Shatila as well as the
other besieged camps. Old or young, female or male, there was almost universal
participation in digging tunnels, making sandbags, providing food for the fight-
ers and caring for the wounded. Abu Mustafa remarks how supplies were shared
by all:
From the first day of the siege, all the institutions of the camp, public or private,
were collectivized. . . . We collected all the flour from the homes, baked bread
in the public bakery, and distributed bread equally to everyone, in shelters, in
homes and in the bases. . . . Money had no value during the siege, there was no
buying and selling. Defense was for all and homes were for all. . . . All were
equal. . . . Every home was on the front line.
(Sayigh 1994: 254–5)
It is evident from the Shatila siege testimonials that it was ordinary people – low-
ranking cadres, young men and women, housewives, children – who were main
agents of resistance, putting whatever resources they had into defence of the com-
munity as a whole. Young women were particularly active. Samia describes the
tasks they undertook during the third, five-month siege:
[W]e started digging trenches. It was mainly the job of girls because the fight-
ers can’t stay digging for twenty four hours. Often we dug at night because the
shelling then was slightly less. . . . Twenty women were martyred and around
twenty more were wounded. Our comrade Diba Masriyyeh lost an eye. It was
we girls who brought flour from the Political Office to the bakery and it was
our job to prepare dough for the organizations. . . . In addition, we shared in
social work as part of the women’s union. One of our jobs was to distribute
milk powder to children; another was the distribution of supplies. . . . Active
girls had other roles. They sat with families in the shelters and encouraged
them because at the end people began to despair. They felt that the battle would
never end and that everyone would die.
(Sayigh 1994: 310)
Um Ahmad was one of those who shared bread with others:
We had stocks but there were other people who had nothing. We said it’s a
shame that we are eating and they aren’t, so we gave a little food, here and
there. We had 300 kilos of flour; we thought the siege is bound to end before
we finish it; so when I baked, I gave people who had no bread two or three
loaves. Every day I baked 70 to 80 loaves. . . . Then the flour finished but the
siege went on.
(Sayigh 1994: 295)
In his celebration speech as the five-month siege ended, Abu Mujahed, one of
the camp’s civilian leaders, stamped Shatila as site of resistance by saying that
it was ‘a thorn in the flesh of all who conspire against it’, a metaphor that draws
on a Palestinian rural language of resistance. Abu Mujahed recounts a significant
moment in the final days of the third siege of Shatila, when starvation was causing
despair, that shows how resistance – normally targeted against Israel – can shift into
the mode of internal opposition. The internal leadership decided to start its own
media campaign, aimed primarily at the Palestinian leadership outside, which was
taking its time in negotiating an end to the siege. Abu Mujahed again said: ‘The
word coming down from the leadership outside was not to take any action that
could harm political contacts . . . [but] we had reached zero point with no choice
left except a military operation [outside the camp]’ (Sayigh 1994: 315, 316). At this
critical point, the survival of the local community was pitted against the ‘strategic’
aims of the leadership. This anecdote suggests the oppositional potential inherent
in local resistance: the people of Shatila were ready to ‘defend the camp with our
bodies’, but not to die of starvation waiting for the leadership outside to reach a
better deal with Syria.
Jenin camp
In spite of temporal and contextual differences between the sieges of Shatila and
Jenin,13 certain common themes can be heard in the testimonials of the survivors that
56 Rosemary Sayigh
suggest that the people of the camps are in the process of producing a latent ‘oppo-
sitional consciousness’. Among the most important is a cluster of ideas around the
local camp/community: its equivalence to Palestine; its capacity for self-organized
resistance; its status as place embodying refugee rights; and its character as a local
community framing familiar actions and relationships. Survivors of the siege of
Jenin (April 2002) insisted on the importance of staying in Jenin and of restoring
the camp to exactly how it was: ‘We want the camp as it was: our harat . . . the
families, the people. We want to return’ (Tabar 2007: 14). Even young children
express the desire to return to homes in the camp (Tabar 2007: 33). The desire to
return and rebuild mingles defiance of the destroyer with attachment to a place
where one belongs:14
When I enter the camp I feel a sense of joy. I feel a peace of mind, I feel at ease
with my neighbours, the people I have lived with . . . The life that you live, you
love to keep living it. Humdul’illah, I am still living in the camp.
(Tabar 2007: 16)
Tabar writes of the ‘efficacity of small acts’ as part of what constitutes a com-
munity and its capacity to live again after siege and devastation. This recalls the
way Um Ahmad of Shatila offered bread to neighbours during the third siege of
Shatila, and how young women ‘sat with families in the shelters and encouraged
them because at the end people began to despair’. Individual acts such as that of
the mother of a Jenin martyr, who refuses to change the dress she was wearing
when her son was killed, will be re-told until it becomes a collective story of pop-
ular resistance. Here the dichotomy between ‘act’ and ‘discourse’ is broken down.
Tabar’s idea of the ‘banality’ of speech through which siege stories are recounted is
valuable in reminding us that such stories are not merely testimonials produced for
outsiders, but part of a process through which cataclysmic violence is lived through
and familiar life-ways re-installed. Episodes of siege such as those of Shatila and
Jenin are revealing because they create a time of trauma that frees camp people to
criticize the national leadership for its ‘deals and compromises’, a critique com-
pounded by the inequality between their lives and those of the national elite.15 Also
almost every member of these besieged camps is activated and finds a necessary
role as agent of defence. This re-identification lasts after the ending of the siege in
rituals of mourning and the small acts that restore ‘normal’ life.
Another common feature is what Tabar calls the ‘heterotopic’ character of Jenin
besieged, as a place of marginality where ‘counter-narratives’ within nationalist
discourse may be produced and from which a different future can be imagined, just
as Abu Mustafa describes the first siege of Shatila as a time when ‘money had no
value’ and ‘all were equal’, expressing his desire for a Palestinian society charac-
terized by social justice. This is one reason why the poorer strata of Palestinians
have perceived with bitterness the privileges gained from the Oslo Accords by the
political elite.
Another common feature of these camp siege testimonies is the critique they
contain of intra-Resistance competition, shared even by faction members. Abu
Mustafa’s comment that ‘There was no son of Fatah, no son of the Popular Front
or Democratic Front. Everyone was fighting for himself and his camp’ is clear as
a critique of factional competition.16 Tabar quotes a similar comment by a local
Jenin cadre: ‘after the invasion of Jenin, my first priority is the people here in the
camp and the other factions in Jenin, over and above the political party’. Criticism
of the national leadership is expressed obliquely in the Shatila siege testimonials in
the threat to conduct a military operation outside the camp. Tabar also notes such
a contrast in quoting a local leader:
The lesson of the resistance in Jenin is not that we cannot resist Israel. We
are a people with small means and limited capabilities, but we were able to
stand up to the army. This achievement can be replicated. But we need a better
leadership. What happened in Jenin was a result of the unity of the factions
in Jenin and the trust of the families; this resulted in the steadfastness of the
camp and enabled the fighters to resist the invasion.
(Tabar 2007: 22)
The words of people in Shatila and Jenin, recorded in a moment of trauma after
violent attack, reveal a sense of living the ‘national’ in a way that the Palestinian
political elite does not. Tabar (2007: 10) notes that ‘[i]n the aftermath of the local
resistance to defend Jenin camp against Israeli invasion, a palpable tension and
animosity were expressed within the camp towards the Palestinian Resistance
leadership for their inaction during the invasion’.17 It is in such exceptional times
that people express feelings suppressed by the routines of everyday life, revealing
moments of collective appropriation of positive, self-ascribed identifications as
‘real Palestinians’ and as ‘people of the camps’. Moments of self-organization in
the camps in the absence of a national strategy attest to positive identifications.
Further research at the camp and local community level would surely reveal many
different ways that ‘Palestinianism’ is embodied through initiatives that restore, if
only momentarily, identification as ‘Palestinians’, ‘strugglers’ and ‘revolutionar-
ies’ that the Resistance movement transmitted at its beginning. Defence of the
camps against attack may be seen as too ‘natural’ to be evidence of a capacity for
self-organization with a national resonance, but this argument ignores the ques-
tion of the cultural and historical origins of the capacities of local communities to
organize themselves.
Self-organization in the camps

The people of the camps have been viewed by scholars primarily through the frame
of dominant institutions – United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the
host government and the PLO. This perspective deflects attention from occasions
when camp people acted/act on their own, without external direction. The efface-
ment of local activism is also a by-product of a national discourse that categorizes
the camps as markers of the Nakba, areas of ‘need’ and redemptive social work and
58 Rosemary Sayigh
as targets of recruitment. Grass-roots political actions are rarely observed by outsid-
ers, not because they do not occur but because the gaze of most people, whether
scholars or activists, is fixed upon the words and actions of national movement
figureheads, viewed as constituting the national-political. It is symptomatic of the
extent to which camp people have been objectified that their right to a group voice
has neither been recognized nor claimed, nor are they represented as a category
within the PLO ‘umbrella’. Though often claimed as the key to a regional settle-
ment, refugees and their rights have been conceived by the national leadership as
a bargaining counter rather than as a distinct social group to whom political rec-
ognition is due. When the PNC set up a Directorate of Palestinian Refugee Affairs
in 1964, it was with management rather than representative functions.18 Instances
of self-organization in camp communities have often been short-lived because of
host government repression, but nonetheless deserve attention as bases for work
towards normalizing and humanizing the camps and towards restoring a sense of
agency to their inhabitants.
Research in NGO newsletters, camp websites or oral testimonies would certainly
reveal a host of examples self-organization. For example, in the 1950s, before the
PLO’s formation, the people of the camps in Lebanon (and probably elsewhere)
were forming clubs and naming them after villages and towns in Palestine.19 This
use of names to establish connection with Palestine was carried out spontaneously,
in the absence of a national movement. More recent cases may be cited, for example
the popular meeting in the Far’ah camp (West Bank) in December 1995, an action
that gave birth to the ‘Haq al-Awda’ (Right of Return) movement.20 Convened
before the elections for the Legislative Council in 1996, the Far’ah camp meet-
ing opposed Arafat’s plan to amalgamate the camps into municipalities for voting
purposes, and was thus significant as an early act of resistance to the NA, and as
a claim to refugee ‘group rights’ (Shaqqura 1995). It was followed by other meet-
ings in West Bank camps during which a resolution was taken to form popular
regional refugee councils inside and outside OPT, which would elect delegates to
a Higher Council representing refugee rights.21 This development was cut short
in 2000 by Israeli violence and closure, but its initiation forced the Palestinian
National Authority and political factions to take account of it. Linked to attrition
of the PLO as a representative/unifying national institution,22 the Right of Return
movement has grown into an international coalition with affiliated groups in most
Arab and Western countries. Though it has not so far called for the inclusion of
camp refugees as a specific group with rights to representation in settlement nego-
tiations and national institutions, such a step is within the logic of its aims and its
support basis in the camps.
A writing off of popular refugee mobilization because it has not yet modified the
‘givens’ of the Palestinian struggle would be to ignore the potentialities of what
is happening on the ground, where micro-resistance continues without national
leadership direction. Protest against the ‘Separation Wall’ in the West Bank is
local-based, not part of a campaign organized by the NA or the Resistance parties.
In a similar way, demonstrations in camps in Lebanon, whether protesting the
Israeli siege of Gaza, or commemorating the Nakba, are organized under local or
loose inter-camp direction. Since the establishment of the NA in OPT, innumer-
able national activities have been held throughout the diaspora without reference
to the national leadership.
Another instance of independent grass-roots action took place in 2002, at the time
of the Legislative Council elections in the West Bank/Gaza Strip. A social activ-
ist in the Bourj al-Shemali camp (South Lebanon) devised the idea of a ‘refugee
poll’ aimed at demonstrating to the NA that ‘outsider’ refugees would not accept
permanent disenfranchisement. A plan was developed to select candidates and
set up polling booths in every camp in Lebanon. Though the project failed to get
beyond the planning stage, partly because of non-support from political forces,
the ‘refugee poll’ nonetheless points to the possibilities of camp self-organization.
This action should be viewed in the context of calls in France, Belgium and Jordan
for diaspora refugees to claim the right to participate in elections.23 The Internet
offers an effective tool of mobilization to such initiatives, even if still not yet fully
utilized.
A further instance of self-organization comes from the Shatila camp where in
mid-2005 a popular committee was formed through a process of election. Camp
residents in Lebanon have long accused the popular committees of corruption and
ineffectiveness. Early in 2005, some residents of the camp claiming non-affiliation
with any faction reached agreement to organize the election of a popular commit-
tee that would represent the camp’s residents rather than the Resistance groups.
They carefully set up the rules and stages of the elections: everyone over the age
of 16 could vote; everyone over the age of 20 could stand for election as long as
he/she was unaffiliated and of good character. The Lejnet Ahali al-Mukhayem
(Committee of the Families of the Camp) was duly elected and began to deal with
chronic problems such as lack of electricity and clean drinking water.24 Its activities
could not continue after political pressures forced six members to resign, but the
story of its brief existence clearly points to the desire of local camp communities
for more authentic representation, as well as to their ability to plan and carry out
elections independently.
Any approach to the ‘local’ today must pass through the radiating prism of the
Internet. The reach of the Internet to camps was limited at first by poor infrastructure
and the cost of computers, but by 2003 access had become available to a fairly large
segment of camp people through NGO social centers, internet cafes and personal
computer possession (Aouragh 2008). The Internet has enhanced transnational com-
munication between camps, as well as between camps and solidarity groups outside.
Many networks have been created specifically to connect diasporic Palestinian
communities. Maktoob, Lajee, the Badil and Haq al-Awda coalition, the Across
Borders Project, Rafah-Today, Out of Country Voting and Children from Shatila are
only a few of such re-connecting webservs. In Lebanon, the Bourj al-Shemali and
Nahr el-Bared camps have set up websites that offer local news, connection with
widely dispersed family segments and database resources used by journalists and
researchers.25 The Internet offers the people of the camps not only an escape from
immobility but also a means through which to form common stances and claim a
voice in national policy (Khalili 2005; Aouragh 2008).
60 Rosemary Sayigh
The Civitas report
The Civitas project used participatory methods to initiate discussions with Palestinian
refugees in more than ten Arab countries as well as 13 non-Arab countries, pub-
lishing their viewpoints in 2006 under the title Palestinians Register.26 Attachment
to the PLO as sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people is widely
expressed, but most speakers follow up by insisting on the need for reform of the
PLO as well as its revival. Reform is associated with elections and these are called
for at every level of the PLO, from the PNC down to camp popular committees.
Calls for the election of popular committees have a strong basis in camp opinion,
especially in Lebanon, and have been manifested in attempts to replace them such
as the one described above. A typical statement regarding the PLO is this:
Some people don’t trust the PLO. Let us be outspoken here. There is corruption
in the PLO. Also, by not representing all the spectrum, and different forces, it
has resulted in separating people from the PLO. So what is basically needed
is first to reform the PLO, then to activate the institutions, and then to have
the participation of all the people in it.
(Nabulsi 2006: 42)27
A popular desire for authentic representation through elections is evident throughout

the Civitas report. Speakers express their discontent with the ambassadors appointed
by the president of the NA, accused by practically all the communities of doing
nothing to represent or help them. A more widespread discontent is expressed
with higher levels of the NA/PLO and with local popular committees, accused of
corruption and nepotism. But the most reiterated demand is for elections to the
PNC and an end to appointments. Indeed, elections are the single most demanded
mechanism for reactivating the PLO,28 with several speakers alluding to the example
of expatriate Iraqis voting in the elections of January 2005. Speakers are fertile
with suggestions for re-activating the PLO, for example through ‘an independent
and democratic refugee movement’, a ‘Palestinian Parliament’, a ‘popular confer-
ence’ and a ‘refugee council’ (Nabulsi 2006: 47, 59, 60, 187). They also call for
the forming of elected local committees that can speak to the leadership and for
stronger inter-community communication. Several speakers suggest that represen-
tation should be on a geographic rather than a factional basis as at present. Other
suggestions reflect a desire to shift the political centre of gravity away from the NA
towards the whole diaspora, in proposals such as forming elected local committees
and stronger inter-community communications through radio and satellite channels.
It is evident that a large proportion of Civitas project speakers are camp residents,29
while many of the exiles in the West are likely to have emigrated from camps.
The many calls registered for the revitalization of the unions also point to a
crystallizing of camp refugee consciousness, since the unions formed the main
arena for the participation of camp refugees in national movement politics. Camp
residence is associated with the right to vote by many speakers, for example this
participant in a workers’ meeting in Baddawi camp (Lebanon):
[A]n election must be made to elect members in the camps to represent the
Palestinian communities within the Palestinian National Council framework . . .
We said that we want independent people to join the popular committees and
speak in the name of independent people who don’t belong to certain factions
. . . we want someone to represent us in the PLO, or more than one person, of
course, in the National Council.
(Nabulsi 2006: 61)
Conclusion
Taken on their own, the testimonies of survivors of the sieges of Shatila and Jenin
might be dismissed as too local and transient to have wider national meaning. Yet
such an argument would minimize the truth released by trauma, as well as trauma’s
power to stamp popular memory. The idea that the self-organization shown by the
people of Shatila and Jenin under attack is an historically transmitted practice gains
strength when related to other instances of camp self-organization in the absence of
external authority. The participants assembled by the Civitas project, coming from
non-elite strata – camps, popular unions, migrant communities – call for a reformed
PLO that will not merely represent, but also include and enfranchise them.
The degree of crisis reached in the national movement by mid-2008 is such that
the institutions that Palestinians have struggled since 1948 to establish are threat-
ened with constitutional collapse. In such a moment, camp communities assume
a special importance in national politics first because they are linked to pre-1948
Palestine and commemorate the Nakba; second because most of their inhabitants
have refugee identification cards and cannot melt into host country societies; and
third because they have accumulated practices of surviving violence, rebuilding
communities, claiming the rights of citizenship and resisting politicide that are
part of a (still unwritten) history of the Palestinians as a people. Just as camps
embody the United Nation’s special responsibility for the ‘refugee problem’, so
life in the camps shapes Palestinian identification in complex ways that, however
individualized by survival pressures, embrace common experiences and common
links to a country.30 Because the people of the camps have no stake in a settlement
that would dispose of them by fiat, in settings where they would be handicapped
as new immigrants without capital or professional skills, they are likely to resist
arrangements to displace them again, especially if they are not represented in
‘settlement’ negotiations. Even if, as Sari Hanafi suggests, they would in the last
resort choose to go to countries where they possess ‘social capital’ (Hanafi 2007),
it is unlikely that they would rapidly transcend the socio-economic disadvantages
of camp origins.31 Their interests as a status-group lie in preserving their historical
and political specificity against dissolution in a second diaspora.
Above other sectors of the Palestinian people, the people of the camps have a
primordial interest in reviving the PLO and making it more representative of their
group rights and claims. A peace settlement that denies them participation will be
no settlement at all. In these conditions of threat to their right to real representa-
tion, it is conceivable that their latent identification as ‘Palestinians of the camps’
62 Rosemary Sayigh
will become more forcefully articulated and their demands for representation as a
collectivity within national institutions more organized. Israel’s blitzkrieg against
Gaza in January 2009, exposing as it did the NA’s inability to take a national stand,
will only increase camp people’s desire for a more national leadership. A widespread
recognition that the ‘insiders’ gained no more from Oslo than the ‘outsiders’ and
that no state the ‘international community’ allows them will be politically sover-
eign or economically viable, creates some of the conditions needed for renewed
struggle towards the inclusion and enfranchisement of all Palestinians under a
revived PLO.
Below the surface of current stasis ferments a search for alternative frameworks
of national struggle. These include legal associations such as the Coalition of the
Right to Return, which links refugees in all parts of the diaspora and OPT, the
Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel and
a legion of international solidarity and media groups. Other collectivities have
emerged – and continue to emerge – from what may be termed ‘oppositional’ cur-
rents. Though handicapped by formidable obstacles, these currents are compelled
by ‘road map’ frustration to try to reconstruct a broader framework of struggle than
exists today. Two questions arise within this perspective: how will ‘Palestinianism’
be sustained through what is likely to be a protracted struggle for an independent
and viable state? And how will ‘Palestinianism’ be broadened to include practices
of an eventual citizenship: elections, free debate and recognition of the rights of
‘others’? Many experiences of state- and society-building suggest that a national
liberation movement that does not begin to build a just society before statehood
will not do so afterwards. A recognition of group rights and multiple identifica-
tions as part of liberation is a necessary condition for steps towards a democratic
nationalism to be installed before, not after, the achievement of a state.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank people who commented on this chapter, especially Terry
Rempel, Yezid Sayigh, Bashir Abu Manneh, Jamil Hilal and Mayssun Sukarieh.
All tendentious statements are my own. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes
1 For a good discussion of local attachment as part of Palestinian ‘identity’, see Khalidi
(1997: 20, 153).
2 Brubaker and Cooper usefully distinguish between ‘hard’ (political) and ‘soft’ (cultural)
meanings of the term ‘identity’ and propose that ‘identification’ should be used where
active political forces are at work, and other terms such as ‘self’, ‘subjectivity’ or ‘belong-
ing’ for cultural and psychological manifestations (Brubaker and Cooper 2000).
3 E.g. Jalazone (Yahya 2006); Bourj al-Barajneh (al-Hajj ‘Ali 2007).
4 Refugee scholars have noted variation introduced into family relations and culture by
dispersion (Serhan 1991; Salah 1996).
5 I avoid the word ‘democratic’ here because its use as code for ‘free market’ has made
it politically meaningless. ‘Pluralist’ at least hints at the possibility of inter-group
recognition and equality.
6 ‘Typically organic models stress the interdependence of component parts as well as their
differentiation’: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_(model) (accessed
30 June 2010). Many nationalisms have adopted the idea of the nation as a living body.
The danger of the body image is that it naturalizes autocratic male rule.
7 This has been well shown for African and East Asian women’s movements in Meintjes
et al. (2001).
8 ‘The formation of groups . . . is always fraught with the danger that, instead of advancing
the legitimate claims of its members, it may turn an oppressive power on them’ (Isin
and Wood 1999: 38).
9 Though UNRWA worked in Israel from 1950, registering and aiding these ‘refugees’,
in 1952 the Israeli government asked it to leave.
10 We need studies of Palestinians in second or third countries of migration to see to what
extent migrants are disadvantaged by camp residence.
11 The author recorded the Shatila testimonies immediately after the first siege ended and
continued after each phase of the Battle of the Camps (Sayigh 1994). The Tabar paper
is likewise based on interviews that the writer conducted with survivors of the siege of
Jenin refugee camp in 2002–3 (Tabar 2007).
12 Shatila camp has often been targeted for attack because of its character as base for
Resistance group institutions and its closeness to Beirut. For the ‘Battle of the Camps’,
see AbuKhalil (1985) and Sayigh (1994).
13 Though the Shatila camp suffered casualties and heavy destruction of housing during the
‘Battle of the Camps’, it was not overrun. Jenin camp was attacked by the Israeli army
from land and air in April 2002 during the Israeli re-invasion of the West Bank, suffering
the destruction of whole quarters and a heavy death toll among its defenders.
14 After this paper was written, the inhabitants of the destroyed Nahr el-Bared camp (north
Lebanon) expressed the same determination to return to the camp.
15 The ostentatious show of privilege by NA leaders after in 1995, displayed by villas,
chauffeur-driven vehicles and easy movement across checkpoints made them extremely
unpopular.
16 Factionalism reappeared in later sieges of Shatila and is described in the testimonies as
damaging to popular morale (Sayigh 1994: 297–301).
17 A similar hostility to the NA for its inaction was shown by Palestinian communities
during the Israeli attack against Gaza in January 2009.
18 The Directorate of Refugee Affairs (DRA) was formed at the beginning of the PLO,
directly under the jurisdiction of the PNC. After the Oslo Accords, Arafat retained it,
allegedly to serve as evidence of refugee representation in negotiations with Israel. The
DRA has generally been directed by a member of Fatah.
19 See the history of the Bourj al-Barajneh camp (al-Hajj ‘Ali 2007).
20 The Far’ah meeting was organized by members of the Youth Action Committees (YACs).
YACs were originally set up by UNRWA as part of its social services but became
independent during the First Intifada.
21 There are different explanations of why a camp-based refugee leadership has not so far
emerged from these meetings. Someone close to the West Bank campaign said: ‘The
major problem we had here was with the intervention of the political parties that could
not accept that it would not be them to represent the refugees.’ The determination of
host governments to prevent popular mobilization must also be factored in.
22 ‘Until recently refugees were collected around and integrated into the PLO’s policy by
the national struggle as slogan, culture, organization and practice. Today refugees are
not represented in most, if not all, Palestinians social and political institutions.’ (Samara
1997).
23 ‘On 25 January 2006, some 1.8 million Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian West
Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip will have the right to vote for
their candidates to the Palestinian Legislative Council, the parliament of the Palestinian
Authority set up under the 1993 Oslo Accords. However, some 6 million Palestinians
64 Rosemary Sayigh
exiled in Arab states, Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, and Palestinian citizens of
Israel, have remained stripped of their right to participate in Palestinian democratic
decision making and are denied their right to return’ (from a Badil press release,
22/01/2006). Voting registers were set up in Paris and Brussels.
24 For further details see Kortam, Chapter 12, this volume.
25 The two camp websites have developed somewhat differently in response to local creativ-
ity: Bourj Shemali’s website is more informational, with a database used by researchers;
Nahr el-Bared’s is an extension of the locality, catering mainly to the people of the camp
and their relatives abroad (Mona Abu Rayyan, meeting, 13 June 2008).
26 The Civitas project grew out of an endorsement of the right of return by the British
Joint Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry on Refugees (2000, 2006). It held popular
meetings in refugee communities worldwide: in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine,
Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, UAE, Yemen, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Greece,
Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, UK, USA, Australia (Nabulsi 2006:
12–25).
27 The PLO is not spared from criticism, e.g. this speaker: ‘The PLO is what is left in a
framework that has been completely emptied from content; a non-legitimate National
Council; a non-legitimate unelected Executive Committee; and a union structure that
had been dissolved by a decision from inside the PLO which resulted in the absence of
the students, labor, and women’s unions’(Nabulsi 2006: 34).
28 See particularly Nabulsi (2006: 56–61).
29 Speakers’ place of residence is given and sometimes social category (student, worker,
woman, handicapped, etc.).
30 The meagre information available about migrants from camps in the wider exile suggests
that they tend to form residential clusters, maintain connection with original camps and
use foreign passports to visit homes of origin in Israel.
31 Besides social stigma, the most damaging of these handicaps is low levels of profes-
sionalization, especially in Lebanon where most camp manpower is still, 60 years after
the Nakba, employed in crafts or low-level services, with only 16 per cent professionals
(Ugland 2003: 145).
Part II
Urbanisation, place and
politics
4 Palestinian refugee camps in
Lebanon
Migration, mobility and the
urbanization process
Mohamed Kamel Doraï
Introduction
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)
make a clear distinction between refugees in camps and refugees outside camps,
whether in urban areas or rural settlement. This categorization is linked to the
implementation of their policies of assistance and eventual protection. The rapid
development of refugee movements in the Middle East since the 1990s, such as
Sudanese in Cairo or Iraqis in Damascus and Amman, and the permanence of the
Palestinian question, invite us to reconsider the modes of settlement of refugee
groups. Refugee camps, that focus attention of many observers are not, accord-
ing to UNHCR statistics, the main location of refugees in the world. Refugee
camps gather around 25 per cent of the whole refugee population worldwide. In
the Palestinians case, the situation is quite similar to that of other refugees, even
if the proportion of refugees living in camps is higher – around one-third of the
registered refugees are still living in camps – and variable depending on the area
where they are settled. In reality, the number of refugees living in camps is higher
if we add the refugees living in unofficial camps or informal gatherings that do
not benefit from the same assistance and services from international organizations
or host states. The boundary between camps and gatherings is blurring and some
refugees live in camp-like situations.
Palestinians constitute the oldest refugee community in the region since the
Second World War. Today in Lebanon, more than 50 per cent of the registered
refugees still reside in the UNRWA camps, which symbolize the vulnerability of the
Palestinian presence in Lebanon. On the one hand, Palestinians face a wide range
of legal, political and social constraints in Lebanon. On the other hand, from the
Cairo Agreement in 1969 to the Israeli invasion in 1982, Palestinians have enjoyed
in this country a freedom of action that no other host state ever gave them. Sixty
years of exile have generated new forms of local integration, especially in urban
areas where refugee camps are now part of the cities that surround them. Since the
late 1940s, refugee camps transformed deeply from tents to highly dense, built-up
areas. As mentioned by Jihane Sfeir (2008: 208), since the 1950s the places where
Palestinians settled in the suburbs of Beirut were not only Palestinians areas, but
68 Mohamed Kamel Doraï
poor and segregated neighbourhoods where marginalized migrants, such as Syrians,
Kurds or Armenians, also settle. Parallel to the urbanization process, refugee camp
population has profoundly changed due to emigration, internal displacement and
social mobility. The Palestinian experience in Lebanon challenges the dichotomy
between urban refugees vs. camp dwellers and leads us to reconsider the boundary
between these two categories.
After discussing the problematic use of the categories of urban refugees and
camp dwellers, the urbanization process of the Mar Elias camp is developed to
analyse the role of migration and mobility in the redefinition of the boundaries
between the camp and the city. This chapter is based on semi-structured interviews
with Palestinian refugees living or working in the Mar Elias refugee camp and for-
eign workers living in the camp conducted between 2005 and 2007. A total of 20
interviews have been made (15 with Palestinians and 5 with foreign workers) as
well as regular informal discussion with key informants in Mar Elias and Shatila.
Observations on daily mobility of the camp dwellers and outside visitors have
also been made during regular visits to the camp and its surroundings during the
same period.1
Urban refugees vs. camp dwellers
Blurring categories
Refugee studies have produced since the 1970s a wide range of categories to
describe refugee movement or settlement such as urban refugees, camp dwellers,
self settled refugees, etc. (Black 1991; Fábos and Kibreab 2007; Kunz 1981; Rogge
1977; Zetter 2007). Recently, researchers have shown a growing interest on the
issue of urban refugees in the world, pointing mainly the problem of protection
and access to services they face in the Third World big cities (Jacobsen 2006).2
The differences between urban refugee and camp dwellers have been studied, but
the transformation of refugee camps into urban areas spaces has not been studied
as such except in a few cases (Agier 2001, 2002; Bulle 2008; Hyndman 2000;
Malkki 1995a; Seren 2004).
The classical distinction operated between refugee camps dwellers and urban
refugees is mainly an operational one produced by international organizations. This
categorization has to be differentiated from the evolution of refugee camps and
from the practices developed by the refugees themselves. Refugee camps are not
closed areas even when they are geographically isolated, they can be connected to
a wider urban environment through mobility or transnational connections such as
remittances (Doraï 2003; Fresia 2006; Horst 2002).
In the Palestinian case, due to the rapid urbanization of the Middle Eastern
countries, most of the refugee camps are part of the capitals and main cities in their
respective countries or host regions, as mentioned by Ishaq Al-Qutub:
In the case of the Palestinian Arab refugee camps – such as those existing in
the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – they are
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon 69
prevailing features of the urban structures of these states. . . . The camp cities,
both small and large, can be considered as urban conglomerations in the demo-
graphic and ecological sense. . . . These cities represent a unique urban pattern,
which has special features, problems, structures, and consequently requires a
special classification in the study of urban societies in the Middle East.
(Al-Qutub 1989: 91, 107)
Refugee camps can become parts of urban areas or may become themselves urban
centres due to their demographic weight and the variety of activities developed,
such as socio-economic activities, political centres of decision making and the
central role they play in the Palestinian society in exile. In some specific cases, the
categorization depends upon the institution in charge of the refugees. For example
in Damascus, Yarmouk is considered a refugee camp by the Syrian authorities
whereas UNRWA does not recognize it as such. At an operational level (interna-
tional responsibility, access to services, legal context, etc.) a clear distinction exists
between camp dwellers and urban refugees. But the analysis of the geographical
development of refugee camps in their local context leads us to consider the refu-
gee camps as urban areas. Camps tend to look increasingly like that of the poorer
informal urban areas nearby. The temporal dimension of the Palestinian exile is
also a key element to take into consideration. Sixty years of exile have led to a
specific relation with their host societies, with a strong local integration linked to
a rapid urbanization of the different host countries parallel to a strong segregation
due to the socio-political and legal context.
Place and mobility

The categories of urban refugee and camp dweller are often considered through
their place of residency and not according to their short- and/or long-term spatial
practices. Mobility is a key practice to take into consideration because it reveals
the complementarities of different urban spaces and the different kinds of relations
they have. Refugees living in camps experience different scales of mobility (daily
movements, temporary and long-term emigration, forced displacement, etc.) and
develop a wide range of practices (economic, political, cultural and/or social activi-
ties) that extend beyond the camp’s boundaries. Mobility and migrations have to
be understood in their different temporalities (Rémy 1996). In the long term, the
refugee camp population changes, some refugees leave the camp to settle elsewhere
and newcomers come to settle in the camp for a variety of reasons that will be later
developed. Different generations of refugees have experienced life in exile, each of
them having a specific relation to the camp, due to specific socio-historical context.
Individual trajectories also contribute to blur the distinction between urban refugees
and camp dwellers. Many refugees reside successively inside and outside camps
during their life to access different kind of resources (Hyndman 2000: 158–62;
Fresia 2006).
Refugee camps themselves host temporary or more permanently different waves
and groups of refugees. New immigrant communities also settle in the camps and/
or around the camps. In Damascus for example, Iraqis refugees settle in neigh-
bourhoods composed of Palestinian refugees, internally displaced Syrians from
the Golan and internal migrants coming from the countryside. The same pattern
can be found in most of the Middle Eastern cities such as Beirut, Amman or Cairo
(Al-Ali 2004: 9–12). Urban margins, where refugees and migrants settle, are not
disconnected from the urban dynamics of the surrounding cities:
The city is never simply the spatial organization of the mosaic of territories:
territories of second settlements upset sooner or later this organisation, to
produce more confused moral, composed of cultural hybrids themselves pro-
duced by successive migrant population belonging to the same community or
to different ones.3
(Joseph 1998: 93)
Refugee camps develop ties with their urban environment and even if they are
segregated and marginalized, they are part of the urban settings that host them.
Daily mobility crosses camp boundaries. Refugees can live in a camp and work or
study outside the camp, or vice versa. Urban practices – such as shopping, visiting
family or friends, accessing services or assistance – often lead refugees to go in
and out of the camps and to frequent other neighbourhoods.
The camp and the city: local forms of urban integration

Since the arrival of the refugees in 1948, the Palestinian presence in Lebanon has
always been problematic, and the Lebanese authorities oscillated for a long time
between support for the Palestinian cause and the will to control the Palestinian
political and military activities. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), cre-
ated in 1964, developed its institutions in its different host countries. The rise of
Palestinian power, which coincided with the decline of the Lebanese state’s author-
ity, was sustained by an important institutional development in the Palestinian
camps. There is a clear link between military and political empowerment of the PLO
on the one hand, and the growth of Palestinian social and economic institutions as
well as the development of infrastructures in camps on the other. Since 1975, the
different conflicts (civil war, Israeli invasions and Syrian interventionism) have
aggravated the tensions between the PLO and its allies on one side, and certain
parts of the Lebanese society and militias on the other. After the Israeli invasion
of 1982, the eviction of the PLO leadership and militia has deeply changed the
relations between the Palestinians and Lebanese.
The present situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is the result of 60
years of contested residence in the country. From their arrival in Lebanon until the
signing of the Cairo Agreement (1969), Palestinians were marginalized by the host
society and deprived of basic rights. The aim of this agreement was to regulate
Palestinian–Lebanese relations. It has opened new opportunities for Palestinians,
giving them the possibility to work and develop their political activities as well
as their military presence in the camps. The military activities of the Palestinian
commandos were allowed, theoretically in coordination with Lebanese authorities.
The self-organization of the camp residents was also promoted through the creation
of local committees (Klaus 2000: 57–68).
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon: a marginalized population

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are currently one of the most underprivileged of
the diaspora communities in the Middle East. They suffer from a wide range of
legal restrictions. The Lebanese legislation is very strict regarding Palestinians
since the arrival of the first refugees in 1948. This legislation has been modified
according to the agreements – and the disagreements – between the PLO and the
various Lebanese governments. It limits the access of the refugees to the labour
market, to the education system, to the international mobility, to the social and
health system, as well as to the formal property market (Al-Natour 1997; Said
2001). The legal status of the Palestinians has important implications on the socio-
spatial organization of this community in the Lebanon. The refugees tend to be
confined in the informal sector or in the least profitable labour activities that do
not require an official work permit. Furthermore, the departure of the PLO in
1982 deprived a number of refugees of jobs developed by the strong presence of
the Palestinian political institutions in Lebanon. In the fragile Lebanese economic
context since the end of the civil war, the Palestinians are marginalized on the
informal Lebanese labour market with the arrival of low-cost foreign manpower
(Jureidini 2003; Chalcraft 2006).
Today the situation is more and more precarious for Palestinians. This is due
to the political confrontation between the current parliamentary majority and the
opposition. Although the Palestinians are not strictly speaking part of the internal
political conflict in Lebanon, the question of their permanent settlement in Lebanon
(tawtin, ‘implantation’) as well as the presence of weapons in camps challenges the
political neutrality of the Palestinians in a conflict with a strong regional dimension
that tends to implicate them de facto. Since 2003, some improvements – most of
them very marginal – show a possibility of partial normalization of the Palestinian
– Lebanese relations. For example, relations with Lebanon improved with the
partial – and controversial – abolition of the ban on working in certain job sec-
tors. In December 2005 posters produced by the organizations of the Palestinian
civil society to claim the right to work, to own a property, for security in Lebanon
beside the right of return, indicate the evolution of some parts of the Palestinian
civil society in its relation to its host society. The destruction of the Nahr el-Bared
refugee camp in Tripoli symbolizes the reversibility of the Palestinian settlement
in the country.4 The case of Nahr el-Bared shows that refugee camps – as well as
urban informal areas – because they are considered as temporary spaces can always
be subject to destruction or unilateral state intervention.
Camps in Lebanon are also under the strict control of the authorities. The situ-
ation varies between the camps considered, depending on ‘security’ reasons. The
camps in the south are under strict control because of the presence of Palestinian
political parties and their militias (such as the Rashidiyyeh camp south of Tyre),
or jihadist groups (such as Aïn al Helweh near Saïda). Mar Elias, the focus of this
chapter, is not controlled by the Lebanese army. Other camps in Saïda, Tyre or
Tripoli are under the strict control of the army and non-Palestinians have to ask
for authorization to enter some camps. Control of the entrances of refugee camps
plays an important role in the degradation of the Palestinian housing situation.
These measures have been applied in a very strict way from the beginning of
the 1990s until 2005. Some camps still have a single entrance controlled by the
Lebanese Army. This only applies to the camps in the south and Nahr el-Bared
in the north. The other camps are not surrounded by the Lebanese army. Cars can
be searched and it was forbidden to bring any building material inside without
previous authorization. These limitations prevent any maintenance or renovation
of houses. Another consequence is the difficulty for the young couples to settle
in the camps in single-family units, because they cannot build new houses. The
control of the camp materializes in the space by the physical presence of the army
at the entry of the camp, and the closure of all the secondary roads that connect
the camp with its immediate spatial environment, leaving only a single entry for
the cars.
These limitations are sometimes abolished and new constructions appear in
the camps, depending on the relations between Palestinian organizations and the
Lebanese state. Since spring 2005, some camps, such as Al Buss in Tyre, witness
an important densification of buildings, with numerous families taking advantage
of the abolition of the limitations to add a storey to their house, others to build new
rooms. Yet, these limitations can be again imposed on the refugees by decision of
the Lebanese authorities (Doraï 2006).
Mar Elias, a camp in the city

The Mar Elias camp was been created in 1952 by the UNRWA, on a small area of
5,400 m² in the south-west of the Beirut municipality. In 1958, according to UNRWA
figures, the camp hosted 449 registered refugees and this rose to 616 in 2006. The
first inhabitants of the camp arrived by boat following the creation of the State of
Israel in 1948. Most of them had an urban background mainly coming from two
Palestinian cities, Haïfa and Jaffa. Most of them were Christian and they were first
accommodated in the Greek Orthodox convent of Mar Elias. In 1952, they resettled
to a camp set up in the wood close to the convent. The large movement of emigra-
tion – especially Greek Orthodox families – characterizes this camp, the population
of which has remained stable since its creation (Sfeir 2008: 238–40).
Today, the camp is situated at the crossroads between Beirut’s southern suburbs
of Bir Hassan and Ouzaï, Ras Beirut and Cola intersection. Most of the refugee
camps are located far from the city centres. Mar Elias is located in privileged area
at the crossroads between the one of the main centres of Beirut (Ras Beirut) and
the southern suburbs that gather poor internal migrants and internally displaced
people from the south of Lebanon, as well as more recently arrived refugees such
as Sudanese and Iraqis. Cola intersection is one of the most important transport
hubs in Beirut and connects to most neighbourhoods of Beirut and all the southern
part of Lebanon. This central location facilitates circulation both for camp dwellers,
who can easily reach other parts of Beirut, and for people from outside the camp
wishing to come whether they are from Beirut or from other regions of Lebanon,
especially the southern coastal region.
Mar Elias camp is a densely built-up area, with narrow streets, most of which cars
cannot enter. If old small houses of one floor do still exist, most of the buildings
are now composed of two or three floors. As is the case for most refugee camps
in Lebanon, the only way to accommodate more refugees is to add new storeys to
existing buildings and take advantage of each unoccupied squared metre inside the
perimeter of the camp. The prohibition of any spatial extension of the camps since
their creation has led to the existence of highly dense spaces. The camp contrasts
strongly with its environment by its density in an urban environment with higher
buildings separated by large streets. The quality of the building also characterizes
the camp. While Palestinian buildings are irregular, most of them are in bad con-
dition, as is the camp infrastructure (sewage system, electricity, roads, etc.). The
camp appears as a pocket of poverty in an urban environment in rapid evolution
since the end of the civil war, even if, according to its inhabitants, it is perceived as
one of the best camps in Beirut, where Palestinians with a certain level of income
live. Mar Elias residents often emphasize the relative quality of the infrastructure
(water and electricity) as well as the quality of life due to the small size of the camp.
It is often compared in the discourse to the Shatila camp, which is described as
overcrowded with a very deficient infrastructure. The fact that a large proportion
of the residents in Shatila are not Palestinians is also pointed out and often linked
to the rise of criminal activities, which are not described in Mar Elias.
The camp’s location has facilitated the development of different sets of activities.
A number of Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are present in the
camp, such as Beit Atfal Al-Soumoud, Palestinian Martyrs’ Association, Ghassan
Kanafani Cultural Foundation, Al Inaach, Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Aidoun,
Palestinian Human Rights Association, etc. They developed their activities in the
camp because of its central location in Beirut and the relative freedom they can
enjoy as Palestinian NGOs, even if they must have a Lebanese person to head them,
who can, however, be from a Palestinian background. The camp also host offices
from most of the Palestinian political parties.
Commercial activities developed in the camp, some dedicated to the Palestinian
population of the camp and others to Lebanese customers living in the neighbour-
hood or workers employed in the surrounding manufacturing businesses. A typical
example is the experience of the Palestinian refugee who first opened a restaurant
in the camp before deciding to reside there:5
I arrived in Mar Elias in 1992. I lived previously in Tell al Zaatar and Damour.
I bought a house in the camp and opened a small restaurant. In 1994 I came
to live here. I opened the first restaurant in the camp. It was a good economic
opportunity. Most of the customers come from the enterprises around the camp
as well as daily workers working in the construction sector. Eating here is less
expensive for them than in other restaurants, that’s why they come here.
Two different small commercial areas have been developed along the eastern
and western boundaries of the camp. The western one is situated on the main
urban highway from southern suburbs of Beirut to Ras Beirut. The activities (a
garage, a furniture manufacturer, a grocery seller, etc.) are not geared towards the
camp population, but to customers coming from other areas of Beirut. The eastern
commercial area is mainly composed of small grocery sellers, fruit and vegetable
sellers, etc. This area is frequented both by camp dwellers and inhabitants of the
neighbouring districts. Prices are generally lower in refugee camps than in other
places. The same phenomenon can be found in other camps, such as Al Buss in
Tyre (south Lebanon) or Jabal Hussein in Amman (Jordan).
Mar Elias can be qualified as an urban space due to four main elements. First, the
temporary camp has been transformed in a dense, built-up area, composed of two
to three storeys buildings connected to the infrastructures such as water, electricity,
telephone, etc. Second, originally conceived as a place to accommodate Palestinian
refugees and offer them a temporary shelter and humanitarian assistance, the social
composition of the refugee camps have changed deeply, with some refugees leav-
ing the camp, others settling in along with a growing presence of non-Palestinians
in certain camps such as Mar Elias and Shatila. The camp became one stage in
the migratory trajectory of the Palestinians. Third, the location in or outside the
camp is the result of a residential choice, linked to renting prices, work opportun-
ities such as in other neighbourhoods in Beirut where migrants settle. The camp
can no longer be considered only as a place of refuge. Fourth, the development
of economic activities tends to integrate the camp into its local environment; Mar
Elias is visited by outside non-Palestinian individuals. As mentioned by Michel
Agier (2002): ‘Due to their very heterogeneity, camps may become the genesis of
unexpected cities, new social environments, relationships and identification.’ A
new social environment emerges due to the high level of in and out migrations in
the camp and the diversity of social backgrounds of its inhabitants since the end
of the civil war in Lebanon.
The key role of migration in the evolution of the refugee

camps
Migration plays a crucial role in the social evolution of the Palestinian refugee
camp in Lebanon. As shown by Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinian refugees have been
internally displaced several times during the Lebanese wars. Three refugee camps
have been totally destroyed – and not reconstructed – during the wars. Ninety per
cent of the refugees have been forced to leave their home at least once during the
war (Sayigh 2005). A state of instability and spatial mobility are two major aspects
of Palestinian life in Lebanon. This leads to a blurring of the distinction between
camp and urban settlement. If we consider Palestinian journeys over the long term
(i.e. individual, familial and intergenerational itineraries), most of the refugees have
experienced life in and outside the camp. International emigration also plays an
important role in creating a dynamic house and rental market, and brings in new
migrants who move in and settle in the camps and Palestinian gatherings.
Palestinian migrations
Due to high level of international and internal emigration, only a few of the fami-
lies that settled in Mar Elias camp in 1952 is still there. They have been gradually
replaced by Palestinians coming from other refugee camps such as Tell al Zaatar
in Beirut after its destruction in 1976 or Rashidiyyeh south of Tyre. Other refugees
settled in Mar Elias in 1991 after having been internally displaced during the civil
war. The high level of both internal and international emigration can be explained
by three factors. First, a large number of the Palestinian refugees who came to the
Mar Elias Convent had Lebanese family ties through marriage. Their local integra-
tion has thus been eased by the kinship connection they had with their host society.
Second, their urban origin from Haïfa and Jaffa has facilitated their integration
in the city, contrary to most of the refugees coming from a rural background6 in
other camps such as Shatila or Burj al Barajneh in the Beirut urban area. Third and
last, relating to the previous point, their high education levels have led to higher
international emigration. A combination of these interrelated factors – urban origin,
religious affiliation, family networks – has facilitated their movement from the
camp to other Beirut neighbourhoods and abroad.
The Palestinian population currently living in Mar Elias camp is the result of dif-
ferent migratory experiences, be it people internally displaced by war and/or other
forms of internal migration (economic opportunity, renting market, geographical
location). The cases that follow show the plural role of the camp in the life-long
migration process. Most of the refugees interviewed between 2005 and 2008 have
lived successively in and outside refugee camps during their life. Their migratory
experience is also made up of a combination of forced displacement – for exam-
ple after the destruction of Tell al Zaatar – and search of a better economic and/
or housing situation. The camp is a stage in the professional career, in the family
life and in the migration process. Most of the refugees who are currently living in
the camp originally came from other camps, even if they reside outside the city
for long periods. The main purpose of the internal Palestinian migration towards
the camps in Beirut is to find employment and improve the quality of life, such as
shown by the families settling in Shatila (Sayigh 1994: 65).
The first case illustrates the plural roles played by the refugee camp as a tempor-
ary refuge at the end of the Lebanese civil war, before being able to access a better
housing situation outside the camp:
My parents left Palestine in 1948 and settled in Tell al Zaatar. In 1976, when
the camp was destroyed we left to settle in Damour. We stayed there until 1982.
Then I went back to Beirut where I squatted in a free apartment in the Raouché
area. I opened my small workshop in Verdun, but rent price increased and I
began to look for another place. At the end of the civil war in 1991, I had to
leave the apartment and I decided to buy one in Mar Elias from a Palestinian
who left to go to Denmark. I chose Mar Elias for two main reasons. First, it was
a central location where my previous customers could easily come. Second,
prices for accommodation and for my workshop were lower than in other
parts of the city because Mar Elias is a refugee camp. Buying an apartment in
a refugee camp is easy for a Palestinian, you just have to register the transac-
tion at the popular committee and then at the UNRWA. As I have children I
decided to move with my family and rent an apartment outside Beirut. I rent
mine in Mar Elias to a Palestinian NGO for 200 USD per month and now I
live in a large apartment in Naameh [a village south of Beirut] for the same
price. I come here everyday to work.
This skilled workman has combined his residency outside the camp – while keep-
ing a property in the camp – and his economic activity inside the camp. The end
of the civil war and the end of the prohibition of Palestinians buying properties
have generated interest in the camps, while it is impossible to buy a house in other
parts of the city. The legal discrimination faced by Palestinians in Lebanon leads
them to buy property in the refugee camps where they can access some of the basic
rights denied them outside the camp such as property ownership and paid work, as
mentioned in the second case that follows:
I was working in the 1970s for the PLO in Rashidiyyeh camp then I moved to
the southern suburbs of Beirut in the 1980s. I stayed in Haret Hreik until 1987
and then I moved to Raouché. I came to Mar Elias because I was working for
a Palestinian political organization here in 1997. As I was displaced during
the war, the Ministry of Displaced gave me 7,000 USD at the beginning of the
1990s. I bought a house in the camp with this money. In parallel, I opened a
grocer’s shop in the camp. I rent the store for 100 USD per month. I appreci-
ate to live in Mar Elias, it’s a quiet area with a good infrastructure compared
to the other camps in Beirut.
Due to the fragile political environment in Lebanon, some Palestinians prefer to

live in a camp, where most of the inhabitants are Palestinians. Along with the rela-
tively low prices for accommodation, camps still play a strong symbolic role in the
Palestinian society in exile, attracting refugees as is expressed in this third case:
I am originally from Tell al Zaatar. When the camp was destroyed I left to go to
Damour and then to Saida. In 1988 I came back to Beirut to find employment.
After working in different sectors I decided to settle in Mar Elias because it
is a quite place with a central location. In 2000, I bought my shop for 14,000
USD and I work as a hairdresser. Most of the customers come from outside the
camp because they know me and also because it is cheaper here. With four other
Palestinians we bought a piece of land in the middle of the camp and built a
four-storey building. Each apartment will cost us around 30,000 USD. I decided
to buy something here because my mother wanted to live with Palestinians in
a quiet area. We feel more secure to live in a Palestinian environment.
One of his employees is a Palestinian from Iraq who came back in Lebanon in 1999
when the situation there deteriorated.
The growing foreign presence in the camps
Parallel to the Palestinian secondary migration towards camps, these areas have
witnessed the arrival of Palestinian refugees coming from other parts of Lebanon
as well as arrivals of a few Lebanese citizens and Syrian, Asian and African immi-
grants who settled following the end of the civil war at the beginning of the 1990s.
Migrants in transit, staying for longer or shorter periods in Beirut, tend to settle in
the marginalized ‘popular’ neighbourhoods of the city. Their presence is visible in
the public space, through the development of businesses with bilingual signboards
on the streets and by the periodic influx of migrant populations – mainly house-
maids but also construction workers – on Sundays in certain neighbourhoods such
as Dawra (east of Beirut). This attachment of migrants to specific urban areas is
stressed by Karen Jacobsen (2006: 276):
Like all urban migrants, asylum seekers are attracted to urban centres because
economic resources and opportunities, including education for their children,
are concentrated there, and in cities migrants can access the social networks
and ethnic enclaves that supports newcomers, and which initiate the process
of integration.
Through the settlement of international migrants, the camp is playing a role in

the city as a host area for newcomers, mainly poor immigrants. The camp has thus
hosted different waves of refugees and immigrants, like other deprived areas of the
southern and eastern suburbs of Beirut metropolitan area.7 These migratory patterns
are crucial parts of the urban dynamics. The camp plays the role of temporary ‘host
space’ for waves of migrants settling in the city for different reasons. Palestinian
refugees living in poor, low-income areas are well placed to play host the new
immigrants. Deprived of the right to work in Lebanon, they can earn money from
renting property. Some of them decide to add a new floor on the top of their house
and rent it to migrants for 100 to 150 USD a month. It gives them a supplementary
income. A Palestinian owner in the Mar Elias camp summarizes the reason why he
decided to extend his apartment and rent it:
As I am Palestinian I am not allowed to work legally in Lebanon. In the

mid-1990s I decided to build a supplementary floor on the top of my house. I
constructed a two-room apartment plus one single room separated by a small
terrace. This brings me around 200 USD per month. The room is rented by
two Sri-Lankan domestic workers and the apartment by a Sudanese family
with two children.
Thus, because many Palestinian families have emigrated abroad or changed

their place of residence in Lebanon – when they have enough money many refugee
families leave the camp to rent apartments in the city – some houses are free to be
rented to other families. A Palestinian grocer in Fakhany explains:
My sister and her husband own an apartment in the neighbourhood. They left
for Denmark in 2005, where they live now. They left their apartment for rent
and, as I am living here, I manage the renting for them. Presently a group of six
young Sudanese share the apartment for 200 USD. They just arrived in Lebanon
a few weeks ago. We never see them; they wake up in the morning, they go to
work, and they come back at night. Sometimes they buy food here.
The house rent in the refugee camps is lower than in other places, especially
compared to central Beirut where accommodation is expensive, hence it attracts
poor, new migrants (Sudanese, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, etc.). The fact that secur-
ity forces do not enter the camps is an advantage to undocumented migrants who
feel more protected from eviction. Thus, for a variety of reasons, a refugee camp
such as Mar Elias, but also Shatila or Fakhani – a vast Palestinian urban gathering
– became host places for new migrants. The presence of recently arrived migrant
workers or refugees generates a variety of interactions and complementarities with
a migrant population settled in Beirut for decades such as the Palestinians.
Palestinian refugee camps – or areas with a strong Palestinian concentration
– host an increasing number of migrants since the mid-1990s. Some of them are
refugees or asylum seekers as is the case of Iraqis in the Shatila camp in 2003, but
the majority are irregular migrant workers. Various groups of immigrants live in
the camps: low-income immigrant workers, irregular migrants, asylum seekers,
unrecognized refugees, domestic workers, etc. Some settle there in the long term
with their family, others – mainly newcomers – transit through the camp before
finding employment and activating community networks of solidarities that will
allow them to improve their situation and move to another neighbourhood or to
pursue their migratory journey towards Western countries. The presence of this
non-Palestinian population in refugee camps leads us to reconsider the traditional
perception of refugee camps and to view them as spaces of urban relegation. The
migrant communities participate in the blurring of the boundaries between the camp
and the city.
Accommodation of migrant populations in precarious situations obey certain
imperatives: a relatively low cost given the low level of migrants’ resources, a
secure space that allows them to avoid being exposed to police controls and a rather
central location that facilitates access to employment and minimizes the distance
between employment and residence for security reasons. The Palestinian refugee
camps, as well as Palestinian gatherings, offer numerous advantages for irregular
migrants. A Sudanese living in Mar Elias explains why he settled there:
I left south Sudan because of the insecurity which reigns there. I moved initially
towards Khartoum. I could not stay there because it was impossible to find a
job, and because of the discrimination we faced. I then decided to leave. Egypt
tightened its migration policy and it was not easy for us to cross the border
to go there. I thus took a plane to Damascus. Syria does not ask for a visa for
the Sudanese. Once in Damascus, I found other Sudanese already living there.
As there is no work in Syria, one advised me to go to Lebanon, the wages are
better, and the Sudanese find work there rather easily, especially in the clean-
ing sector. I crossed the border illegally, by paying a smuggler and I arrived
in Beirut. As I do not have residency permit I prefer to live in a refugee camp
where the police does not enter. Also it is cheaper and close to my work.
Forms of socio-economic complementarities emerge between migrant and refu-

gee populations originating from different waves in these areas of urban relegation.
A rental market develops in the Palestinian camps and gatherings, which satisfys
the host (Palestinians) and hosted (newcomers) populations. The small grocery
stores that we find in camps or in the Palestinian gatherings also benefit from the
presence of these customers according to the interviews with Palestinian small
shopkeepers settled in these areas.
Conclusion
The Palestinian refugee camps tend to evolve by becoming integrated into the
economic activity and into their urban environment. Even if they are still marginal-
ized and segregated areas, they are now part of the major cities in the Middle East.
Economic activities, daily mobility, the presence of new international migrants and
the strong political and cultural significance for the Palestinian refugees are the
different elements that characterize the contemporary Lebanese refugee camps as
urban settlements. The Mar Elias situation is not an isolated one in Lebanon. Al
Buss camp, in the Tyre region, witnesses a similar development. It is becoming
increasingly difficult to discern the western boundary of the camp. Many Lebanese
Shi’ite families driven from the Israeli-occupied southern border zone built an
informal neighbourhood next to the camp. The numerous businesses that have
been established along the main road on the northern and eastern sides of the camp,
developed both by Palestinians and by the Lebanese, serve to integrate the outer
fringe of the camp into the townscape. It is the geographical situation of the camp
of Al Buss at the entrance of the city and at the crossroads of main roads that has
facilitated this evolution (Doraï 2006).
Most of the studies on refugees establish a clear distinction between refugees in
camps and urban refugees living in cities. The Palestinian case, due to its excep-
tional duration and the context of rapid urbanization of their host countries, invites
us to partly re-examine this dichotomy. If some refugee camps appear to be iso-
lated from their urban environment – such as Aïn al Helweh, Borj al Shamali or
Rashidiyyeh – most of the refugee camps in Lebanon (as well as in most of the
Middle Eastern cities) are now part of the main Lebanese urban areas. A diachronic
analysis of the different camp’s evolution should be developed to retrace their
specific history and the ties with their local environment. On the one hand, camps
appear to be marginalized and segregated areas due to the special – and often
changing – regulation and mode of controls as well as the legal status of their
Palestinian residents. On the other hand, refugee camps are strongly connected
to their urban environment through the daily mobility of Palestinian refugees, the
growing presence of other groups of refugees and migrants (such as Syrian or Asian
workers and Iraqi or Sudanese asylum seekers and refugees), and the development
of commercial activities that blur the boundaries of the refugee camps, making
them a part of the city.
Notes
1 I would like to thank J. Abu Hawash and the Palestinian Human Rights Organization
for their help and fruitful discussion all along my fieldwork.
2 A special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies on urban refugees (vol. 19, no. 3) was
published in September 2006.
3 ‘La ville n’est jamais simplement l’organisation spatiale de la mosaïque de territoires:
les territoires de deuxième implantation viennent tôt ou tard bousculer cette organisation
pour fabriquer un moral bien plus confus, composés d’hybrides culturels produits par
la succession des populations migrantes, appartenant à la même communauté ou à des
communautés différentes.’
4 Nahr el-Bared is a Palestinian refugee camp established in 1949 in the northern part of
Lebanon, 16 km north of Tripoli, hosting more than 30,000 individuals. Between May
and September 2007, fighting between Fatah al Islam and the Lebanese army led to the
displacement of the camp population and the destruction of the camp infrastructure and
houses (see Knudsen, Chapter 6, this volume). The camp was composed of two parts:
the ‘old camp’, the official one, was totally destroyed, while the ‘new camp’, the unof-
ficial extension, was partly destroyed. There is an ongoing project to reconstruct the
camp, but until now most of the refugees are still displaced living in precarious shelters
in and around Beddawi neighbouring camp and elsewhere. Some families managed to
return to the camp in prefabricated houses in March 2008.
5 The interviews in the Mar Elias camp were conducted in 2006 and 2007.
6 It is estimated that two-thirds of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are from rural areas
(Khalidi 1992).
7 See for example Berthomière and Hily (2006) and Deboulet (2006).
5 Refugees plan the future of
Al Fawwar
Piloting strategic camp
improvement in Palestine refugee
camps
Philipp Misselwitz
Introduction
Current architectural and urban discourse on refugee camps has been profoundly
influenced by theoretical and analytical concepts borrowed from thinkers outside the
discipline. The extraordinary interest expressed by architects in the work of anthro-
pologists or philosophers such as Agamben (‘state of exception’), who describes
camps as ‘space[s] in which the normal order is de facto suspended’ (Agamben
1995), is indicative of a growing recognition of the complex links between politics,
violence and the built environment. The politicisation of the discourse is accompa-
nied by increasing self-awareness of the complicity between architects, planners
and military strategists. Eyal Weizman’s notion of ‘design by destruction’ exposes
the use of colonial planning practices and contemporary urban warfare, which could
be observed during the destruction of Jenin, Rafah or Nahr el-Bared. The debate is
indicative of a deep professional crisis. The just critique of the naive unreflecting
architect-builder has led to a deep resignation and pessimism with regard to the
possible roles of architects and planners vis-à-vis refugee camps. Many architects
feel that the only ‘constructive’ mode is giving up on the traditional tools of the
discipline, becoming theoreticians, writers, researchers or activists. The cynicism
(towards their own profession) with which many politically aware architects and
planners began to observe the space of refugee camps has led to a dangerous condi-
tion of passive reflection, in which the current reality is accepted as a fait accompli
and conceiving alternative visions is no longer possible.
A starting point for a different and perhaps ultimately more constructive debate
on the possible involvement beyond critical self-reflection could be a change of
approach: a recognition of camps as complex urban environments where residents
have become experts in surviving on minimal means, improvising, making do with
what can be found and almost immediately transforming the physical, spatial, social
and economic constitution of their initial emergency setting. Palestine refugee
camps most clearly exemplify the ambiguous condition between temporary emer-
gency setting and city that emerged in almost all refugee camps worldwide, which
ethnographers have called ‘Virtual Cities’ (Perouse de Montclos and Kagwanja
2000) or ‘Camp Ville’ (Agier 2008). While Palestine CampCities are indeed
82 Philipp Misselwitz
extremely congested, impoverished, slum-like settings, they have, at the same
time, also evolved commercial centres, souks, distinct neighbourhood identities
and a multitude of social, political and cultural institutions that speak of a collec-
tive ambition towards emancipation and civil rights. Despite all constraints and
restrictions, camps are deeply linked to the physical social, economic fabric of their
surroundings. While acknowledging that urbanised refugee camps count amongst
the world’s most unstable, congested and dehumanising built environments, they
are in many ways not dissimilar to the informally developed slums, which account
for the major part of the urbanised world.
Despite obvious differences, certain recurring and common problems emerge
within both settings. Camps, like slums, have actual needs, which can partly be
addressed by the constructive involvement of urban planners and architects. Linking
the comparatively new discourse on urbanised camps and the rich discourse on
informal urbanisation is therefore only natural and timely. Over several decades,
a rich body of research and practical experience of slum rehabilitation, partly
under extremely difficult political conditions, has taught planners and architects
to understand and utilise the skills of improvisation and resilience – how coping
strategies within squatter settlements can be strategically developed. The analytical
and operational tools developed for slum upgrading and rehabilitation are highly
relevant to the context of urbanised camps.
This chapter reflects on the results of a practical attempt to introduce plan-
ning methodologies such as Action Planning or Community-driven Strategic
Planning to the context of Palestine refugee camps: the ‘Camp Development Pilot
Research Project’ was a two-year cooperation between Stuttgart University and the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
(UNRWA) (2006–8). Over the period of two years, extensive fieldwork conducted
in three West Bank refugee camps and archival research has provided the first
holistic social-spatial understanding of the camps’ gradual transformation from
emergency compounds to urban CampCities. Over a period of eight months, the
joint UNRWA–University of Stuttgart research team analysed the camps as com-
plex built environments, combining an investigation into the spatial and physical
constitution of the camps with an assessment of the varying degrees of community
mobilisation. Numerous empirical surveys as well as qualitative interviews were
conducted. The research became instrumental for the formulation and testing of
a new methodology for comprehensive planning, which builds on existing social,
economic, spatial and cultural assets and provides relief for the camps’ most urgent
problems. The process was steered by camp residents themselves and thereby radi-
cally redefined their long-established relationship to UNRWA and the regime of
externally imposed aid programmes. Based on the direct experience of the author
as the team leader of the joint UNWRA–Stuttgart research team1 this article will
focus on the planning process that brought together community representatives and
UNRWA in an hitherto untested partnership, pursuing an aim that was equally new
and risky: the development of a vision of how Fawwar Camp could develop within
the next five years based on devolving decision-making power to camp dwellers
who began to exercise their civil right to shape their own built environment.
Refugees plan the future of Al Fawwar 83
A difficult beginning: hurdles and obstacles faced by camp
improvement
The UNRWA–Stuttgart research and planning project was set up as a direct con-
sequence of the 2004 Geneva Conference, jointly hosted by UNRWA and the Swiss
government. UNRWA, strengthened with a renewed mandate after the collapse of
the Oslo Peace Process, had succeeded in winning the support of the main stakehold-
ers of Palestinian refugee protection, including the host governments, for one of the
previously most contested and intensely debated proposals: it endorsed ‘commun-
ity development’ as the only viable strategy to address the complex needs of the
ever worsening conditions in congested and poverty-striven refugee camps. More
importantly, ‘community development’ was defined in the conference report as:
the improvement of the Palestine refugees’ livelihoods and living conditions

through the upgrading of their physical and social environments. It demands a
combination of strategic and practical interventions undertaken by UNRWA in
partnership with host authorities, the refugee community and other stakehold-
ers, that are sustainable over time, from a social, economic and environmental
perspective.
(UNRWA 2004)
By clearly differentiating between the ‘right of return’ and the ‘right to live in
appropriate living conditions’, UNRWA thus opened the door for the introduction
of a developmental approach and therefore promised to align UNRWA’s working
approach with universally accepted norms and United Nations (UN) standards. The
conference’s specific recommendations became part of UNRWA’s Medium-term
Plan and included, for the first time in the history of the Agency, the recommen-
dation for the ‘establishment of a new Urban Planning Unit, a tool for addressing
deteriorating camp living conditions in a systematic and holistic manner’. Instead
of viewing the built environment from a purely technocratic point of view, it was
promised that spatial/physical and socioeconomic programmes would from now on
be delivered in an integrated manner, as part of a new strategic approach to tackle
the rapidly worsening situation in the camps. The conference recommendations
highlighted the links among data collection, information and improving planning
and prioritizing on a needs basis – all within an integrated and comprehensive
development approach that engages and empowers camp communities.
The assumption that both defending political refugee rights and civil rights in an
environment of dignity and optimism are compatible sounded good on paper. The
pressure was now on UNWRA to deliver on this promise by proposing concrete
steps to implement internal reform, develop much-needed tools and deliver actual
results. In 2005/6 the Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Department was set
up at HQ level, but, beyond the general goals, the department lacked a methodol-
ogy to deliver comprehensive ‘camp improvement’. After the camps were initially
established in the 1950s and post-1967, UNRWA’s role vis-à-vis the physical fabric
of camps was reduced to two main tools: first, emergency repair and reconstruction
in response to or in the aftermath of armed conflict,2 a reactive approach; sec-
ond, a sporadic and piecemeal shelter repair strategy that could only be used to
help specific families falling under extreme poverty criteria. In short, the physical
improvement had largely been considered a technocratic issue. Strategic urban
planning had remained untested in the context of refugee camps worldwide and
therefore included many legal, administrative, political and practical uncertainties.
For instance, while UNRWA realised that improvement could only be implemented
with the help and acceptance of camp communities, there was no experience on how
to deliver participatory planning. What management structures would be needed
to facilitate a planning process? What planning tools are required and how could
measures be prioritised for implementation? How could UNRWA steer and manage
the vast and unfulfillable expectations that were likely to be raised?
Tremendous expectations, doubts and even fears therefore accompanied the
UNRWA–Stuttgart project, which started operation in summer 2006. In addition,
the research team faced the following hurdles: first, UNRWA had no reliable and
comprehensive data sets on the physical and socioeconomic situation inside the
camps. Data collection had traditionally been the responsibility of each department
and, hence, survey indicators were devised to aid the formulation of standards
and measure success of specific programmes such as education or health only. In
addition, data were mostly collected on country level, instead of camp level so
that UNRWA had no sufficient tool to measure significant variations of conditions
between each camp. The Agency’s data availability was weakest on aspects that
would be of crucial importance to camp improvement such as spatial/physical
surveys, land use, population and building density, structural conditions of shelters
and so forth. At this point UNRWA did not set up a centralised data management
system to produce a holistic situation analysis on camp level. The Agency was
therefore in urgent need of re-conceptualising its approach to data management
with a specific emphasis on urban indicators.
Beyond the lack of empirical data, the bureaucratic, uncoordinated and sector-
specific way in which UNRWA had traditionally delivered its relief programmes has
prevented an acknowledgement of refugee camps as complex urban environments.
On the pretence to ‘merely deliver services’, rather than ‘administer’ the camp, the
Agency had turned a blind eye to the accelerating urbanisation process and had
no understanding of factors that had influenced and/or continue to influence this
process. This includes, for example, the ignoring of the importance of external and
contextual factors (the camp’s physical and socioeconomic relationship to its urban,
suburban or rural surroundings). Furthermore, the Agency had no knowledge of
the community mobilisation inside the camps, the local actors and institutions or
internal conflicts and difficulties.
When engaging with both UNRWA staff and community members, the research
team faced tremendous mutual mistrust. In its top-down approach to delivering
services, UNRWA had developed an ‘institutional arrogance’, not recognising the
local community as partners in developing solutions, but instead, keeping locals at
arm’s length following the logic of ‘if we give them a small finger they want our
whole arm’.3 Little emphasis was given to communicating, in a transparent way,
the constraints under which the Agency operates (including funding shortages) or
considering local feedback beyond technocratic surveys. The general climate of
mistrust fuelled prejudices against UNRWA ranging from accusations of corrup-
tion and incompetence to political conspiracy. Camp improvement was likely to
fail entirely if the relationship between the Agency and the community could not
be improved.
Furthermore, the support of host governments or representative institutions
such as the Lebanese, Syrian or Jordanian governments, the Palestinian Authority
(PA) or the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) vis-à-vis camp improvement
remained unclear. Despite their official endorsement of the 2004 Geneva Conference
and its recommendations, which included a clear mandate for the introduction of
the community development approach, it was uncertain whether host authorities
would be prepared to support genuine community empowerment and participation.
Planning regimes in many host countries are, if at all existing, mostly autocratic
and top-down. Why should a radically different approach be tolerated in the sensi-
tive environments of camps, which had always had always been tightly controlled
and placed under close surveillance? Why should governments risk to ‘share’
decision-making with camp refugees?
Last but not least, the establishment of the Camp Improvement Programme
was hotly contested within UNRWA. Sector-focused thinking, competition over
funding, arguments over competencies and responsibilities and the complex and
somewhat unresolved relationship between ‘Headquarters’ and ‘Fields’ put the
brakes on quick institutional reform.
Al Fawwar camp
The Al Fawwar camp, with a registered refugee population of 7,912 persons
(UNRWA 2006b), is located in an isolated, rural context in the southern West
Bank. Isolation is not only physical but also characterises its relationship to the
PA. While most West Bank camps are located within Oslo Zone A (an area with
limited Palestinian sovereignty), Fawwar is located in an Oslo Zone B enclave close
to Zone C (which is subject to Israeli planning and security control) and in close
proximity to the Israeli settlement of Haggai. When research in the camp started,
the community was still traumatised by a bloody feud between two clans who had
fought over control of a tiny lane within the camp in 2005. As a consequence the
camp lamented four casualties including the former Camp Service Officer. In addi-
tion, 200 family members had been permanently evacuated. According to Penny
Johnson (2007):
the abdication, or absence, of the Palestinian Authority, most notably in the clan
conflict of 2006, which was ‘solved’ by the mediation of religious and tribal
elders from outside the camp . . . is matched by the unbridled presence of the
Israeli army, which not only hinders mobility outside Fawwar camp but shrinks
public life inside the camp, particularly for youth. The entrance is a military
watch tower that can close access to the camp at any given moment.
Strong internal structures – such as Deheishe’s widely recognised and respected
Local Committee or Amari’s Youth Centre – usually provide some guarantee of
internal stability. The deadly escalation of the 2005 conflict in Fawwar suggested
that the camp lacked an equivalent. Jamil Hilal (2007a) observed: ‘In Fawwar,
political organizations clearly do not seem in full control, and a sort of “semi-
clan” formations are vying for influence, diminishing the role of both the Popular
Committee and the Youth Club.’
However, despite the aftershock of the killings and the negative image the camp
acquired as a result, there were some positive signs of change. The Local Committee
had acquired a building (a house formerly used by now-evacuated clan members),
renovated it and equipped it with a computer lab and a permanently staffed office.
After years of passivity and trauma, the camp community had thus become more pro-
active. Instead of institution building and cultural activities that could be observed
in Deheishe, however, the primary focus of Fawwar’s Local Committee’s work was
to improve basic infrastructure – the camp’s standard being amongst the worst of
all West Bank camps. The long-term political stalemate in the camp between Fateh
and Hamas did not seem to affect this work, although the Local Committee (like
most West Bank institutions) was strongly associated with Fateh.
Unlike other camps such as Amari (located within Al Bireh municipality) and
Deheishe (located in the Bethlehem–Beit Jallah conurbation), Fawwar’s camp
community had remained traditional, closed and conservative, especially for
women, with little exposure to urban lifestyles. Some residents work in agriculture,
keep animals in their shelters and cultivate small gardens for family consump-
tion. Unemployment is amongst the highest in all West Bank camps. More than
other camps, Fawwar’s residents had depended on low-skilled construction jobs
inside Israel and now could not find substitute employment inside the West Bank.
Compared to Deheishe and Amari, Fawwar was the least urbanised camp with the
weakest economic sector. After the closure of rural access roads by the Israeli mili-
tary – the camp’s main road had become the only passageway for tens of thousands
of Palestinian villagers and townspeople in the south West Bank region. Instead of
a business opportunity, however, camp residents mainly experienced this road as a
nuisance and danger to their children, being exposed to congestion and the influx
of strangers. Despite obvious disadvantages, Fawwar’s isolated location could also
be understood as an asset, which in the past has allowed residents to purchase
land in close proximity to the camp cheaply – a unique advantage over most West
Bank camps.
When Fawwar was chosen as a pilot for a planning initiative, the decision was
not following the usual UNRWA rationale to ‘start with the worst’. Fawwar did not
represent the largest, most congested, unstable or even poorest camp in West Bank.
Instead, the decision was made on the basis of the enthusiastic welcome from the
community who considered the new initiative as a not-to-be-missed opportunity
to escape long-suffered isolation.
Conflictual planning
A detailed account of the six-month-long planning process, which began in March
2007, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, the following section will focus
on three conflictual moments that occurred at different stages in the process, which
reveal how planning started to challenge the status quo and put established relations
between key actors at risk – thus providing an insight into the enormous challenges
that need to be overcome to achieve genuine participation and power sharing. The
first conflict described unfolded at the very beginning of the planning process and
characterises the fears, reservations and plain confusion triggered amongst the
community when introducing the project for the first time. The second conflict
erupted several months into the planning process at a critical stage when improve-
ment measures needed prioritising and resurfaced in later discussions on definition
of pilot projects. Third, conflicting visions on the format and status of the final
planning document – the Camp Improvement Plan – emerged, which revealed the
fragile status of camp improvement within UNRWA as well as uncertainties about
the future role of the programme.
Throughout the section, I will place particular emphasis on the precarious position
of the planning team, navigating through and mediating in an atmosphere character-
ised by mistrust between the community and UNRWA, as well as towards the notion
of camp improvement as a whole. At the same time, the discussion will show how a
concrete goal, improving the living conditions in the camp, can create a constructive
frame in which long-standing, soured relations can be effectively changed.
Initial fears and mistrust

In January 2007, the first formal meeting was set up with community representatives
of Al Fawwar camp with the aim to secure a sound endorsement of the proposed
planning project. Facilitated by the local Camp Services Officer Ziad Hmoz (com-
monly known as Abu Tarek), the meeting took place in the local Rehabilitation
Centre. Ziad Hmoz’s personal background as a former head of the Local Committee
of Fawwar and the general respect he enjoyed as a community activist and academic
had provided him enough authority to assemble more than 40 camp elders, Local
Committee members as well as heads of the local UNRWA facilities. The reception
was well prepared: ‘This is how we receive guests in Fawwar’, a camp elder stated
when proudly showing the large table filled with plenty of food, biscuits and soft
drinks. Yet, when the meeting was officially opened a considerable confusion was
revealed. UNRWA had never introduced a new programme officially to the camp
community before. Why now? What was ‘Camp Improvement’? As the discussion
proceeded, the respectful and polite tone never changed, yet, articulated in numer-
ous statements, a number of fundamental fears surfaced, one of them, expectedly,
a fear related to the widespread suspicion that camp improvement is driven by a
hidden agenda to ‘normalise’ the camps to become permanent cities, integrated
into their surroundings. Ultimately, this would lead to a context in which the right
of return will be abolished:
Our fear is the following: It is the first time that we feel UNRWA wants to
involve the local community in planning a program. We know that no-one
can implement any program against our will, and all what is going to be done
needs our approval . . . This is what you all the time repeat to us. But still we
are afraid that UNRWA has a political agenda behind involving us as a com-
munity – an agenda which seeks to do away with our sacred right to return to
our homelands.
Another community representative stated:
In 1978, the Israeli Civil Administration offered paving streets and roads for
the Camp, but this was rejected by the people of the Camp fearing the loss of
the right of return and turning the Camp into a town or city. The right of return
is on the top of our agenda.
Finally, and even more explicitly: ‘Why do we need planning, we are a refugee
camp? Camps do not need playgrounds or parks. This is something for cities. Do
you want to transform the camp into a city?’
Equating ‘urban regeneration’ or physical improvement efforts with an attempt
to ‘meddle’ with the political status of camps as temporary safe-havens for refu-
gees has been a constant theme throughout the history of Palestine refugee camps.
This chapter will not be able to provide an exhaustive account of the dynamics of
this debate, and the various factors and vested interests that impacted on it. Worth
noting here, however, is that, although in West Bank uncertainties and confu-
sion are perhaps greatest (with suspicion to be ‘traded-in’ or ‘betrayed’ extending
not only to UNRWA, but also to the main Palestinian institutions such as the
Palestinian National Authority (PNA)), the somewhat ‘orthodox’ position vis-à-
vis urban rehabilitation gave way to a much more pragmatic attitude as soon as
a working relationship was established. Several weeks into the planning process,
one community member reassured a more reluctant fellow:
There are some historical examples that show us that improving the camp life
is not necessarily against right of return. The Gazan experience did not influ-
ence the status of the refugee because UNRWA purchased a piece of land on
which it constructed houses. People were not obliged to leave their houses in
the Camp. Those who chose to move out of the Camp to the new houses left
their house and the land on which the houses were built in the Camp to the
use of UNRWA. This project was well implemented in Gaza and I believe it
is a good one . . . Nobody is depriving us our right of return. No one can ask
the refugee to give up his or her UN ration card known as the sign of refugee
and the symbol for the right of return. The right of return is an individual one
and nobody can decide on it.
Throughout the entire planning process, political concerns did not vanish and
demanded frequent discussion. Often, support and rejection of camp improvement
are expressed in the same statement. After an intensive and productive discussion on
the location and design of a neighbourhood plaza one community member stated:
‘Changing the signs and the status quo of the Camp is one way of substituting
the right of return and considering the Camp a permanent residence for the refu-
gee.’ To the somewhat puzzled planner, he then replied smilingly: ‘Don’t worry, I
think we also need to plant trees in our plaza.’ As contradictory as this statement
may seem to an outsider, the seeming discrepancy between statement and practice
merely reveals that everyday reality in camps has long surpassed a stale debate.
Camp residents have long learnt to claim and exercise civil rights alongside their
ongoing insistence on political rights as refugees. At the same time, refugees have
developed a protective and uncompromising façade, which is only penetrated once
an atmosphere of warmth and trust has been established.
Another concern that surfaced in the initial meeting and haunted the entire
planning process was much more difficult to address: the perception that camp
improvement meant losing other services currently offered by UNRWA. The plan-
ning project was launched in the context of increasing poverty and unemployment
and general political and economic instability in the West Bank. A general sense
of insecurity was heightened by a common perception that UNRWA was reduc-
ing its services and abandoning the refugees in a moment of crisis. Seen against
a background of perceived reduction of services, the notions of participation and
empowerment, the promise to share decision-making and responsibility with the
community are read as convenient excuses by UNRWA to extricate itself from its
commitment to Palestine refugees:
We as a community are doubting whether camp improvement can seriously

improve the daily reality in the camp. How come it is possible to discuss new
needs such as a new clinic for the camp while everybody knows that UNRWA
only recently reduced the medicine that the clinic receives?
Regardless of the rights and wrongs underlying the expressed assumption, the
numerous suspicions expressed towards UNRWA as an agency were indicative of
a relationship characterised by fundamental mistrust and resentment, preceding and
extending way beyond camp improvement and, as the project proceeded, presenting
numerous challenges. Indeed, only much later, the true extent of the resentment
was revealed when both UNRWA staff members and community members freely
expressed their perception of the other as untrustworthy, guided by hidden agendas,
stubborn, unwilling to change and therefore best to be ‘kept at bay’. Statements
from UNRWA staff characterising this belief included: ‘Whatever we do, it is
never enough’, ‘If we give them a small finger, they want our whole hand’ and
‘We know how refugees think. We have gathered experience for almost 60 years.
They cannot be trusted’.
Community members also expressed deep frustration with UNRWA’s style of
service delivery, which was perceived as authoritarian (‘They treat us like cattle
on a farm’, ‘They do not listen to us and always do it their way’) causing some to
question the sincerity of the Camp Improvement Programme (‘Why does UNRWA
suddenly want to know what we want?’). A frequently cited suspicion was that
UNRWA was indeed only introducing notions such as participation and commu-
nity empowerment because ‘it is what donors want’: a convenient rhetoric when
launching fund-raising initiatives, yet irrelevant to the camps where the Agency
would continue to yield its power and force its way. Volunteering information,
ideas and proposals to UNRWA was generally avoided and projects were often
‘kept secret’ as long as possible: ‘If we involve them [UNRWA] they will take it
away from us’.
In light of such fears and mistrust, the formation of a ‘Working Group’ as a joint
UNRWA–community platform for all discussions related to the planning process
became a delicate affair. While in other camps such as Deheishe, a similar initiative
had failed because of internal frictions and reluctance of the Local Committee to sit
with other community groups, in Fawwar the fear was articulated that the Working
Group might be misused to ‘legitimise’ an already pre-prepared concept through
simulated power sharing. Was the Working Group another plot designed to bypass
the legitimate camp institutions? Only through repeated insistence that the project
was indeed open and no objectives and goals had been pre-defined, the Working
Group was eventually assembled. It included 13 individuals, mainly heads of insti-
tutions, traditional figures as well as political figures. In addition to the community
representatives, six local UNRWA staff members were included.
Prioritising needs
The second moment of conflict that will be described here emerged between the
Working Group and an UNRWA field department at a later stage in the planning
process when a first priority list of needs had been drafted. The results of partici-
patory needs assessment conducted in Fawwar had produced a ten-item priority
list. For several years, many Fawwar basic school graduates were turned away
from nearby secondary schools that were already overcrowded. Not surprisingly
therefore, the needs list was topped by the unanimous wish to construct a new
‘Secondary School for Girls’ in close proximity to the camp. As soon as the list
was published, several UNRWA staff members insisted that the secondary school
should be removed from the priority list. The community representatives in the
Working Group vehemently opposed this. How could this legitimate wish trigger
conflict?
In West Bank, UNRWA only offers basic education and had resisted frequent
calls to expand their programme into secondary education. Representatives of the
Education Department indeed felt that the mere inclusion of the school on the list
presented a dangerous precedent, which may be used against UNRWA’s position in
the ongoing debate, and should therefore be corrected. Yet reservations also exposed
a much more deep-rooted fear of letting the community decide on their needs. Some
felt that the entire needs list drafted by the community was problematic since it was
unrealistic, not backed up by empirical evidence and generally read more like a list
of desires, rather than concrete needs. The resulting tensions threatened the fragile
trust and balance of power in the Working Group and the planning process came
to a halt. The community interpreted UNRWA’s clear stance as another gesture of
disrespect towards the community: ‘We told you from the beginning, they will not
listen to us.’ Although the planning team was convinced that the community input
to the planning process should remain ‘unedited’, UNRWA’s ongoing support to
the project was needed.
In the following mediation efforts, it became clear that underlying the conflict
were several profound misunderstandings and general confusion about the aims of
the planning process. Most importantly, both UNRWA staff and the community still
understood camp improvement as a project by and for UNRWA, with UNRWA as
a sole actor. Who else, after all, would help? The insistence of the planning team
that a Camp Improvement Plan should be owned by all stakeholders (including the
community and PNA ministries) seemed simply too remote from present reality
that it was dismissed as unrealistic. Here, ‘institutional arrogance’ met commu-
nity expectations. UNRWA staff naturally assumed that, with an incompetent and
never-to-be-pleased community as well as a passive host government, there were
no other actors. Likewise, the community, although freely expressing their frustra-
tion and disappointment with the Agency, was sceptical that someone else could
indeed pursue the idea. ‘UNRWA is like Abu Ala [Palestinian former prime min-
ister]’, a friend had once explained, ‘we are frustrated but we cannot think beyond
it’. Despite their previous successes in launching proactive initiatives themselves,
vis-à-vis UNRWA, the community seemed all too ready to slide into a passive, yet
demanding role. UNRWA on the other hand fuelled this dynamic through their
categorical and uncompromising stance. Even the proposal to ensure that UNRWA
would only manage the construction of the building not the running of the school
was dismissed by the community.
In an effort to ease tension, the planning team stressed the need for all stake-
holders, not just UNRWA, to take responsibility for implementing improvement
priorities. It was proposed to respect the integrity of the list, but ensure, in writing
that UNRWA would not be responsible for running the school. Planning proceeded,
but trust was only slowly rebuilt. Camp improvement had exposed the fragility of
the status quo. In the absence of a direct and effective dialogue mechanism between
UNRWA and the community, based on mutual respect, fears, misunderstanding
and suspicion disproportionately transformed a simple problem into a threat to
the entire project.
Master plan or action plan?

As planning proceeded, a crucial question emerged: what is a suitable format and
tool to combine the ideas, proposals and strategic goals for the improvement of
a refugee camp? What would be the status of the document? Who would assume
ownership? The legalistic and regulatory nature of a master plan (following a
European planning law) did not seem to match the complex situation of Fawwar
for the following reasons: a master plan seemed too static and inflexible a tool
given the instable and uncertain context of the occupied West Bank as well as the
fact that a functioning legal planning system such as regional development plans
or communal master plans that UNRWA could use as a model and legal reference
did not exist. In general, the responsibilities and modes of interaction between
the major stakeholders (UNRWA, host government, host community, camp com-
munity) remained unresolved. Would a master plan be effective for the area inside
UNRWA’s official camp boundaries only – a boundary, which had in reality long
become blurred due to intensive informal building activities by refugees outside
the camp boundary?
In addition to these technical concerns, the notion of a ‘master plan’ continued
to fuel fears of normalisation and integration. Community representatives in the
Working Group considered a fixed vision as being in contradiction with the tempo-
rary nature of camps and ultimately threatening to the political status of refugees.
The fear expressed by the UNRWA staff members concerned was more pragmatic:
how could UNRWA maintain that the Agency does not ‘administer’ camps (and
therefore be responsible for potential violence against the Israeli Army or civilians,
or the reinforcement of ‘building codes’) if it underwrites a detailed master planning
scheme? Would the mere presence of an UNRWA logo on the plan compromise
the Agency vis-à-vis the Israeli occupying forces? Others argued that a master
plan would raise unrealistic expectations on behalf of the community of what
could be achieved in five years. Facing the huge challenges in the camp, projects
would be likely to be of symbolic nature. At the same time, the internal discussion
process about how to deliver camp improvement within UNRWA was still ongo-
ing. How could UNRWA, several staff members argued, take responsibility for
implementation and reinforcement of the master plan?
The temptation to drop the ambition of a comprehensive plan altogether loomed
large. Why not resume what had worked in the past, to develop and fund raise for
small-scale pilot projects and ad hoc solutions better suited to the likely budgets
available in the near future. The research team, however, defended the need for a
comprehensive, spatial coordination framework as an essential strategic tool, argu-
ing that it was precisely ad hocism, lack of strategic vision and spatial coordination
that had led to the failure of many well-meant projects. During the planning process,
evidence emerged of how commendable initiatives from UNRWA departments and
programmes were frequently contradicting each other and generated confusion on
the ground. A frequently cited example was the evidently absurd case in which
UNRWA’s Shelter Rehabilitation Programme had built a new shelter in an open
space, which had been earmarked as a potential public space. Thus, uncoordinated
actions stood in the face of improvement of an already highly congested camp area.
Without a coordination framework similar to a master plan, the team argued, such
mistakes would reoccur and the opportunity to better synergise programmes and
initiatives would be lost. As a solution, the research team proposed to develop a not
legally binding ‘Camp Improvement Plan’ in a draft version. The plan would serve
as an interim tool and cooperation framework based on the voluntary coordination
of all actors and stakeholders. The plan would address the defined priorities but at
the same time, avoid ad hoc solutions and produce a comprehensive, strategic and
integrated vision for the improvement of the camp over the next five years. The
status of a draft would ensure that the plan could be changed and adapted without
delay if required. Thus, the plan would be ‘dynamic’, rather than ‘static’. Instead
of relying on the reinforcement of rules, it would rely on the voluntary backing of
the Working Group, UNRWA and other stakeholders.
Conclusion
Despite many difficulties, the Fawwar project was an important learning experience
for introducing grassroots participation into decision making at camp level, as well
as for launching the first comprehensive urban planning process in the context of a
Palestine refugee camp. Several projects have been successfully implemented since
and the planning methodology has been developed and applied to other camps.
However, several crucial questions remain to be resolved: who owns the Camp
Improvement Plan and assumes responsibility for regular revision and updating?
What happens after completion of the pilot planning and the implementation of first
actions? These questions expose the current absence of recognised and respected
local camp governance, which could engage in a structured and clearly defined,
eye-to-eye relationship with UNRWA and other bodies. Participation and local
empowerment as realised in the grassroots planning effort are doomed to remain
project-based and temporary if the current status quo is not changed. A substantial
rethinking of camp governance is required to fully exploit the promise and potential
of camp improvement, an initiative that has been based on the premise that UNRWA
cannot and should not represent the camp community.
The project also showed the limitations of ‘bottom-up’ processes. The much
needed local governance structure should not only deliver bottom-up planning
and participate in negotiating processes on a higher level, but also needs effec-
tive partners on municipal and state level. The recognition of a need to combine
bottom-up and top-down processes reflects an important shift in the much broader
discussion on slum upgrading and rehabilitation efforts worldwide. Here, planers
began to insist that good local governance requires sustained top-down backing
and support, and critiqued an over-emphasis on grassroots empowerment tools and
programmes such as Tony Gibson’s influential concept ‘Planning for Real’4 – which
had turned against rigid bureaucratic master planning processes and passionately
insisted on grassroots mobilisation. Ellen Wratten, herself involved in conceptualis-
ing ‘Planning for Real’ critically reflects on its limitations, especially the failure to
address effectively problems that cannot be solved on a neighbourhood level and
require planning on a national or city scale (Wratten 2001). Even UN-HABITAT’s
‘State of the World’s Cities 2006/2007’ report argues: ‘The relationship between
good local governance and its effect on reducing slum growth is often far from
clear-cut . . . [and] does not seem to automatically result in improvements in the
lives of the urban poor, especially in the short-term.’ Grassroots mobilisation on its
own is often not strong enough vis-à-vis other stakeholders to implement policies.
More often than not it lacks capacity and experience as well as the required budgets
for implementation. Moreover, local structures themselves cannot guarantee the
necessary political stability, security and legal framework for a community-driven
action plan to be successful. It is now widely recognised that effective governance
in relation to poverty eradication and slum rehabilitation requires a combination
of top-down and bottom-up processes of decision making involving a broad range
of stakeholders: ‘Local government works, but in many countries it works best
with strong support from the centre . . . to create an enabling environment . . .
What is important is to ensure that bottom-up approaches to governance connect
with top-down systems of decision-making’ (UN-HABITAT 2006: 173). Applying
these discussions to refugee camps means that camp improvement will not only
need to rely on the establishment of an effective model of local camp governance,
but also at the same time secure the necessary institutional backing and support
at all levels.
Can the experience of camp improvement be of use beyond Palestinian camps?
Despite many unique aspects and differences that undoubtedly exist, this chapter
argues that ‘learning from Palestine CampCities’ is not only possible but also
an urgent necessity. In the first instance this obviously applies to the context of
other urbanised refugee camps around the world. Both the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and UNRWA, as well as many other glo-
bally acting refugee agencies and governments face potentially similar contexts
and would be wise to build much closer strategic links in order to address the
challenges ahead. Refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) numbers are pre-
dicted to increase with the frequency of natural disasters related to climate change,
leading to mass displacement from areas threatened from flooding, draught or ero-
sion. Likewise, the number and variety of armed conflicts causing displacement
and suffering around the globe is unlikely to decrease adding to the number of
refugees ‘stuck’ in protracted refugee situations with no durable solution in sight.
Furthermore, the economic stagnation currently experienced in the First World is
unlikely to change the strict asylum policies and IDPs and refugees are likely to
be forced to remain close to the source of displacement. In short, refugee camps
or camp-like situations are likely to house more and more displaced persons. The
average life time of camps will further increase. Camp urbanisation – already
a global phenomenon – will increase; so will congestion and poverty and other
negative aspects or urbanisation. All this only illustrates the urgency to develop
practical models and visions for how to transform existing camp settings into sta-
ble and habitable settings in which refugees can enjoy human rights to the fullest
degree. In this, one may argue, Palestinian camps and their main stakeholders have
a responsibility to lead, given the comparatively well-established service structure
and per capita funding.
Is camp improvement relevant beyond refugee camps? The urbanisation proc-
ess of camps is not fundamentally different from informal urbanisation processes
worldwide. Urbanised camps and informal slum neighbourhoods face many similar
challenges: the need to stabilise the socioeconomic base, improve quality of life,
introduce good governance models on a micro scale and integrate hitherto separated
and excluded areas with their urban surroundings to name but a few. Compared to
the vast and diverse spectrum of strategic planning tools that have been developed
for informal slum neighbourhoods since the early 1960s, the camp improvement
methodology may seem insignificant. If compared to the vast resources that have
been mobilised for slum improvement efforts by international bodies such as UN-
HABITAT (established in 1978), globally operating institutions such as the GTZ,
national governments, municipalities and a vast number of think-tanks, camp
improvement seems to be negligible. Since the UN’s launch of the Millennium
Development process in the 1990s and the adoption of the Millennium Declaration
by world leaders in 2000, slum upgrading has become a central focus of develop-
ment policies worldwide. Does camp improvement therefore offer any new lessons
that could be useful for non-camp contexts?
The methodology is not fundamentally new. The combination of ‘strategic
planning’ and ‘action planning’ is similar to the methodologies recommended in
UN-HABITAT’s ‘Sustainable Cities Programme’. Is camp improvement merely a
highly specific variation on an already well-known theme? It may seem premature
to discuss ‘lessons’ and possible applicability when Camp Improvement Programme
is still evolving and has not yet been backed up by concrete evidence and experi-
ence on the ground. However, the following aspects may offer specific lessons of
interest to planners engaged in slum upgrading: First, Palestinian refugee camps are
extreme environments that are considered to be amongst the most congested and
impoverished urban neighbourhoods in the world. As set Millennium Development
Goals for slum rehabilitation look unlikely to be met and slums are likely to become
more numerous and congested, refugee camps may prove to be important labora-
tories and testing grounds for strategies that will be needed in similarly extreme
slum environments in the future.
Second, the comprehensive UN mandate in Palestinian camps offers many advan-
tages. Slum upgrading efforts are in reality often modest in scale, interventions tend
to be symbolic and there is a lack of necessary power required to reinforce policies
and goals. Programmes rarely last for more than a few years and are ‘thinly spread’
across cities, with reduced impact. The mandate, resources and strong presence
that UNRWA or UNHCR has in camps is unique and could facilitate concerted
and comprehensive rehabilitation efforts on a unique scale. The possibilities for
a comparatively transparent internationally run body guided by UN standards to
influence a rehabilitation process from the early planning stages to implementation
and long-term monitoring are frankly unparalleled. Best practice models in the field
of architecture, planning and good governance could be implemented to a standard
and effect that would be hard to match in an ordinary municipal slum context.
Third, camp improvement could be understood as a ‘Trojan horse’ factor impact-
ing on the culture of planning in the host environment. Slum upgrading programmes
in ordinary cities are still rare and rely on a ‘golden match’ of political vision
and financial resources provided by states or international agencies such as UN-
HABITAT or the World Bank. Only very few visionary municipalities manage to
combine these factors. Under autocratic regimes, the rule of warlords or in conflict
areas such ‘enlightened’ programmes are virtually impossible. Refugee camps are
located in such areas and form safe areas of stability and in many cases already
successfully promote international standards of human rights including concepts
of community empowerment and participation in planning processes. Camps could
therefore initiate best-practice models in regions where the political and economic
preconditions required for slum rehabilitation are not present. The most obvious
potential for copying elements of the Camp Improvement Programme methodology
is in the Near East, neighbouring Arab countries and even Turkey where participa-
tory planning still remains scarce.
In conclusion it could be stated that camp improvement breaks new ground not
only in terms of methodological innovations, but also in terms of the environment
it can be applied to: refugee camps that are amongst the world’s most congested
and impoverished urban environments, located in the most instable and violent
regions of the world. Camp improvement can only mature to a fully functioning
working tool if stronger connections are built amongst UN sister agencies such as
UN-HABITAT, UNRWA and UNHCR. The lack of information flow and sharing of
experience amongst these agencies is alarming. Only once cooperation is improved,
can lessons be learnt from camp improvement and other camp upgrading efforts.
Mutual dialogue and exchange serves the interests of both camp populations and
slum populations.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank UNRWA’s West Bank Camp Improvement Unit and
all other UNRWA staff members involved in facilitating the research that forms
the basis for this chapter. Equally, the author is deeply indebted to all residents of
Fawwar refugee camp for their trust and participation in all aspects of research and
planning that have been referred to in this chapter.
Notes
1 Camp Development Pilot Research Project (2006–8), a collaboration between
Stuttgart University and UNRWA HQ Amman (Infrastructure and Camp Improvement
Department), was funded by the European Commission.
2 An internal UNRWA (2005b) report cites the following examples when this approach
was used: (1) assessing damages and assisting families with a grant for re-housing fol-
lowing the destruction of shelters in Shatila and Ayn al-Hilwa camps in Lebanon; (2)
provision of plots, infrastructure and cash grants for relocation of refugees, e.g. Canada
Camp (1984–2000); (3) reconstruction of multi-unit housing for displaced refugees of
the Lebanese Shatila and Ayn al-Hilwa, Badawi and Nahr el-Bared camps completely
destroyed in armed conflict until the early 1990s; (4) temporary emergency shelters
after the beginning of the first Intifada in September 2000 (Gaza and West Bank); (5)
rebuilding refugee homes damaged or destroyed by Israeli incursions in the West Bank
and Gaza (e.g. Jenin, Rafah).
3 Interview with Muna Budeiri, Head of Housing and Camp Improvement Programme,
UNRWA HQ Amman, Department of Infrastructure and Camp Improvement, conducted
in Amman, 7 June 2007.
4 Tony Gibson first conceived the idea for a method of public participation in the
impoverished East End of Glasgow in 1977 with help of the Neighbourhood Initiatives
Foundation in collaboration with the London School of Economics.
6 Nahr el-Bared
The political fall-out of a refugee
disaster
Are Knudsen
Introduction
In late May 2007, heavy fighting broke out between the Lebanese Army and a new
militia group calling itself ‘Fatah al-Islam’ based in Nahr el-Bared, a Palestinian
refugee camp near Tripoli. After 15 weeks of intense bombardment and sniper
fire, the camp was reduced to rubble and the death toll had reached 500, including
around 250 militants and 169 army troops; another 400–500 soldiers were wounded,
leaving many of them permanently disabled. At least 33 civilians were also killed
in the bloody standoff that had forced the camp’s approximately 30,000 residents
to flee, many of them to the Beddawi refugee camp located 10 kilometres to the
south. This was the biggest violent incident since the civil war ended. The Army’s
hard-won victory was praised by all parties – even by some of the Palestinian repre-
sentatives – but the battle added significantly to the country’s political turmoil and
sectarian tensions. The unrelenting pounding of the Nahr el-Bared camp came after
a three-year period of thawing of relations between the Lebanese authorities and
Palestinians, which had been deadlocked since the early 1990s (Knudsen 2009).
In this chapter I provide a restudy of the Nahr el-Bared emergency, focusing
not on its physical destruction, displacement and human suffering (Khalidi and
Riskedahl 2007), but on the implications of crisis for the political relations between
Palestinians and the Lebanese. Of special interest is the position taken by major
political Lebanese and Palestinian parties and leaders prior to, during and in the
aftermath of the Nahr el-Bared crisis. From this perspective, the seriousness of the
crisis and its dire political implications made it, unlike the many minor skirmishes
that are routinely passed over without public comment, impossible to ignore. Thus,
parties had to articulate their views on the crisis, thereby forcing the Palestinian issue
out in the open, allowing us to examine the current status of Lebanese–Palestinian
relations. In this chapter I examine the role of four major political parties/actors;
two Lebanese (Future Movement and Hizbollah) and two Palestinian (Fatah and
Hamas), in addition to the Lebanese–Palestinian Dialogue Committee (LPDC),
a ministerial committee set up in 2005 to manage refugee affairs. The chapter
builds on interviews with senior political leaders, party officials, non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and academics in Lebanon (2006–9) and field visits to the
Nahr el-Bared and Beddawi refugee camps (September 2008).
98 Are Knudsen
Handling the ‘refugee file’
There is a wealth of information on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, but mainly
on their social problems, poverty and destitution. There is much less information
on their political role in contemporary Lebanon (but see Knudsen 2005b; Suleiman
1999). Nahr el-Bared was not only a humanitarian crisis but also a complex politi-
cal emergency that brought Lebanon’s festering refugee problem to the forefront.
Although marginalised, the refugees and their political representatives are involved
as actors in Lebanese politics. Indeed, the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are
regarded as the most politicised of all the displaced refugee communities and the
most important section within what is often referred to as the ‘refugee file’. The
refugee ‘file’ or ‘card’ is, due to its sensitive character, an important political issue
in Lebanon. This is because of the host country’s negation of their civil rights,
the complexities of their camp-based residence and the fact that the camps have
internal autonomy and are governed by Palestinian factions. The most sensitive
part of the ‘refugee file’ is the question of their permanent settlement in Lebanon,
commonly referred to as ‘implantation’ (tawteen). Handling the ‘refugee file’ is
a delicate balancing act and was until 2005 to a large degree determined by the
primacy of Syria–Lebanon relations.
Deprived of civil rights and therefore of political representation and ‘voice’, the
Palestinian refugees need to explore alternatives to safeguard their minimal rights.
This has made them seek informal relationships with Lebanese parties that range
from consultative to clientelistic. As one of the few democracies in the region, all
Lebanon’s political parties take a stand on the Palestinian issue. For Hizbollah,
the refugee issue is central to its ideology of ‘resistance’ and it has historically
sought a wide representation of downtrodden and marginalised groups (Khalili
2007). The Future Movement’s support is both more circumspect and circumstan-
tial. However, the strength of sectarian politics means that Sunnis show the greatest
sectarian affinity with Palestinian refugees and, hence, willingness to grant them
civil rights (Haddad 2003: 2). One reason for this affinity has been linked to the
prospect of Sunnis using the fighting power of Palestinian militias for protection
in sectarian conflicts (Khashan 1992: 91). The Christian parties found on either
side of Lebanon’s political divide have traditionally rejected the refugees’ pres-
ence and called for their resettlement. In post-civil war Lebanon increased legal
discrimination of refugees helped mainstream refugee xenophobia (Knudsen 2009).
However, the Christian parties’ leverage with the Palestinian issue is limited to
their own constituency; they are unable to control or steward the refugee file on
a national level.1
Political divisions
In the early 1990s, the Oslo Process led to a division of the Palestinian political
groups into two opposing blocs: those opposing the Oslo Process and the Declaration
of Principles (DOP), referred to as the ‘rejectionists’ and those favouring it, mainly
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Fateh, which concluded the peace
Nahr el-Bared 99
deal with Israel.2 The rejectionists were made up of Islamist and secular groups,
the latter mainly nationalist groups formerly associated with the PLO. Due to the
fragmented and disparate leadership of the Palestinian refugees, joining in loose
coalitions with Lebanese parties becomes all the more important as a strategy to
attain the leadership of the Palestinian cause in Lebanon. Thus, the disagreement
over the Oslo Accords and future Palestinian statehood polarised the Palestinian
political groups and disposed them to seek alliances with ‘like-minded’ Lebanese
partners.
From mid-2005, the Lebanese political landscape was likewise dichotomised,
but for other reasons. The assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in
February 2005, conflict over the presidency, Syrian stewardship and troop presence
sharpened these divisions, as did the many assassinations and attempted assassi-
nations that followed (Knudsen 2010). The result was that Lebanese parties spilt
into a sharply divided two-bloc system of pro-independence groups and parties
(aka 14th March) and pro-Syrian groups (aka 8th March). The 14th March coa-
lition is a diverse group of secular Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze parties
and headed by the Future Movement (Tyaar al-Mustaqbal). The 8th March coali-
tion is likewise of Shi’a Muslim and Christian groups and headed by Hizbollah
(Party of God). The assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and
the subsequent Syrian troop withdrawal two months later abruptly reshaped the
Lebanese political landscape and opened a renewed dialogue on several issues that
had been kept under wraps during Syrian stewardship. The parliamentary elec-
tions brought to power a coalition government headed by Prime Minister Fouad
Saniora. After years in the opposition, Hizbollah for the first time joined the cabinet
and obtained two ministerial posts. The 2005 ‘Beirut Spring’, Syrian withdrawal
and election of a new cabinet opened the way for a more dispassionate handling
of the ‘refugee file’. In mid-October 2005, the new cabinet of Prime Minister
Saniora set up the ‘Lebanese–Palestinian Dialogue Committee (LPDC), headed
by former ambassador Khalil Makkawi. This paved the way for a long overdue
rapprochement between the government and Palestinian officials representing the
major Palestinian groups and factions (Knudsen 2009). However, the deep political
crisis gripping Lebanon following the 2006 July War precluded any progress on
sensitive issues; the crisis rocked the country’s political stability and wrecked the
economy.
In late 2006, disagreement over ratifying the so-called Hariri Tribunal (‘Special
Tribunal for Lebanon’) deadlocked the cabinet and in the end led to a governance
crisis. The ministers aligned with the 8th March coalition withdrew from the cabi-
net and Prime Minister Saniora was left to preside over a minority cabinet that the
opposition decried as unconstitutional. When the Nahr el-Bared crisis broke in late
May 2007, the Palestinian and Lebanese political scenes were both dichotomised
and the conflict between the two Lebanese blocs had stalled the political process.
The Nahr el-Bared incident drew different responses from the two blocs and the
conflict between them was played out on the ruins of the camp’s demise. This also
helps explain why the two groups either implicated or absolved Syria for causing
the Nahr el-Bared crisis.
100 Are Knudsen
In the period leading up to the outbreak of the Nahr el-Bared conflict, the security
situation was rapidly deteriorating. The Saniora government was under siege and
the country rocked by deadly assassinations and communal riots. There was grow-
ing concern that Palestinian refugees could become implicated in the governance
crisis and used as a proxy militia for those seeking to destabilise the country and
add pressure to the reeling Saniora cabinet. More specifically, by late 2006 there
were persistent rumours that northern camps were being infiltrated for the purpose
of destabilising the political situation and that Palestinians could be drawn into the
country’s internal conflict. Anxious not to be dragged into yet another war, refugee
officials stressed the importance of keeping the refugees outside what was termed an
‘internal Lebanese conflict’ (Knudsen 2009). The deep political crisis in the country
is probably why Fatah al-Islam’s build-up in the northern Nahr el-Bared camp went
unnoticed. The simmering Nahr el-Bared conflict at first evolved slowly. The first
clash made local headlines in March when a Fatah al-Islam member was killed during
internal fights in the camp (Daily Star 2007h). Throughout May, repeated clashes
between the Army and Fatah al-Islam increased tensions inside and outside the
camp. On 20 May the simmering conflict burst into a major confrontation between
the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and Fatah al-Islam that killed 22 soldiers and
19 militants and made the remaining fighters retreat inside the camp (Daily Star
2007a). During the first days of the Army’s siege of the camp an ad-hoc committee
comprising several of the ‘rejectionist’ Palestinian factions (aka Palestinian Follow-
up Committee) tried to mediate in the standoff but, hopelessly divided, could not
agree on a common approach to deal with Fatah al-Islam. Unable to stop the crisis
from escalating further, the standoff between the LAF and the militants turned into
a complex-political emergency that made the camp a war-zone.
The Saniora cabinet pointed fingers at Syria, claiming that Syria trained, armed
and helped Fatah al-Islam establish itself in Nahr el-Bared. In this scenario, Syria
masterminded Fatah al-Islam’s entry into Nahr el-Bared, planning to use them as a
proxy force to destabilise Lebanon and pull the refugees into the political conflict.
Evidence of this Syrian connection was the fact that the group’s leader, Shaker
al-Absi had been convicted and jailed in Syria before entering Lebanon (Daily
Star 2007j). Moreover, it was argued that the pro-Syrian Palestinian group Fatah
Intifada was the nucleus of the Fatah al-Islam and had taken over their headquarters
inside Nahr el-Bared.3
The Future Movement’s balancing act

The Future Movement was launched by Rafik Hariri through the creation of new
media outlets in the mid-1990s,4 and formalised as a political party in 2007. Following
Hariri’s assassination in 2005, the movement became the leading party in the 14th
March coalition. The movement’s main constituency is the Lebanese Sunnis. This
is one reason why the Future Movement takes an interest in the plight of the
Palestinian refugees, the majority of whom are Sunni too. This especially concerns
those living in the Sunni-majority cities along the coast (Tripoli, Sidon) and in the
capital (Beirut), which has country’s the largest Sunni presence (Khashan 1992).
Nahr el-Bared 101
While the Prime Minister Fouad Saniora was keen on reassuring that the govern-
ment took every precaution to protect the camp’s residents and was committed to
rebuilding it, the most visible Future Movement politician was Bahia Hariri who
since 1992 has been an MP from Sidon.5 Over the years, Hariri has emerged as the
Future Movement’s main spokesperson concerning refugee affairs. In Sidon the
Palestinian refugees represent a major part of the town’s Sunni population. Their
plight is therefore both a local concern and national issue to the country’s Sunni
community. In Sidon, a Sunni-majority town where Rafik Hariri was born, the sup-
port for the Future Movement is very strong. In Sidon, the Palestinian issue is an
especially important one because, first, the Ayn al-Hilwa refugee camp, centrally
located in Sidon, is the country largest and most conflict-prone camp plagued by
chronic insecurity. Located just off the centre of town covering 1.25 sq. km, and
sealed off with barbed wire and Army check-posts, the camp is a powder keg of
internal conflicts.6 Although the refugees are deprived of voting rights, a signifi-
cant number of the refugees in Sidon have obtained Lebanese citizenship, hence
they can vote in elections. This makes the Palestinian issue central in municipal
elections (Hamzeh 2000). As an elected MP from Sidon since 1992, Bahia Hariri
has emerged as the key local broker between the Palestinian camp authorities
and the state. On several occasions Hariri has mediated in internal fights between
camp-based factions, defusing tensions and controlling Islamist groups resident
in Taamir, a popular neighbourhood bordering the Ayn al-Hilwa camp.7 This has
made Bahia Hariri the most prominent steward of Palestinian refugees in her Sidon
constituency. However, this has also made her the movement’s key spokesperson
on refugee issues nationally and is indicative of an increased interest in the refugee
problem in the Future Movement and, more generally, of a heightened interest in
the refugee issue among Lebanese parties.
The government’s view of the Nahr el-Bared incident was that this was a Syrian
plot to destabilise the country and the government (Daily Star 2007j). Opposed to
this, a rumour claimed that Fatah al-Islam was created by Sunni politicians aligned
with the majority Future Movement bloc to serve as a proxy force in the ongoing
political conflict. As proof of this rumour it was claimed that Bahia Hariri bought
out Islamists in the Taamir area who left Sidon and later set up camp in Nahr el-
Bared. Bahia Hariri strongly condemned this charge (Daily Star 2007e). However,
she acknowledged paying about USD 100,000 to the Jund e-Sham militants in
response to a political deal brokered between Fatah and the militants. The deal was
an attempt to break the deadlock over Jund e-Shams presence in the camp perim-
eters and to stabilise the political situation in a camp plagued by chronic insecurity.
The Jund e-Sham militants demanded USD 100,000 as compensation for giving
up their homes in Taamir. With Fatah and the PLO unable to underwrite the costs
of this deal, they approached Bahia Hariri who agreed to pay the sum from her
own pocket. Apparently, most of the members of Jund e-Sham packed up and left
Taamir shortly after and it is assumed that several of them moved to Nahr el-Bared
where they joined the ranks of Fatah al-Islam. The Future Movement’s support for
Jund e-Sham was hence interpreted as an attempt to create a Sunni proxy force to
fight political opponents. This charge, termed a ‘political assassination’ by Hariri,
102 Are Knudsen
opened the way for seeing ulterior motives in Hariri’s actions and made her (and
the Future Movement) complicit in the creation of Fatah al-Islam. Thus, by sticking
Fatah al-Islam on to the Future Movement it was possible discredit the movement
in its core northern constituency, which would weaken the Future Movement at
the expense of traditional northern scions in Tripoli aligned with the 8th March
opposition.8 The smear campaign against Hariri and, by implication, the Future
Movement and the 14th March coalition, continued in November 2008 when Syrian
television aired videotaped confessions by captive Fatah al-Islam militants claiming
that the Future Movement was one the group’s financiers (NOWLebanon 2008a).
The Future Movement strongly condemned these confessions as fabrications and
a Syrian plot meant to incriminate them (NOWLebanon 2008b).
LPDC’s monologue
The LPDC is a governmental body set up by a ministerial decree in 2005 under
the leadership of former ambassador Khalil Makkawi. The creation of the LPDC
signalled an ambition to revive the defunct Palestinian–Lebanese dialogue after a
long period of informal dialogue, thus representing a major upgrade in the political
relations between refugees and the government (Knudsen 2009). The planned role
of the LPDC was as a consultative forum in charge of official dialogue between
the government and Palestinian groups, a task not fully realised. While the LPDC
aims at strict neutrality in political matters, its mandate, history and composition
makes it a mouthpiece of the Saniora government. Apart from the PLO, the other
Palestinian factions have yet to declare their membership of the LPDC. Internal
divisions between Palestinian groups, have made it impossible to agree on par-
ticipation and more generally, a joint referential authority. The LPDC, hence, is
forced to operate despite this limitation, even to under-communicate this lack of
political representation in its work. Without broad-based Palestinian representation,
the LPDC has become the sole mouthpiece of the government, which is why some
have christened it the ‘Lebanese–Palestinian Monologue Committee’. Partly for
this reason, the LPDC’s role is by many considered symbolic (Daily Star 2007g).
Moreover, the LPDC was criticised for being paralysed by political events and
lacking a clear mandate and strategy (Mehri 2007). The fact that only the PLO is
an official member of the LPDC is one reason why the PLO Representative Abbas
Zaki figures so prominently in its official functions. This underlines the LPDC’s
lack of broader representation from the ‘rejectionist’ Palestinian groups. In fact,
there is indication that the LPDC did not want to establish formal dialogue with
groups other than the PLO, which it considers the only legitimate Palestinian partner.
The weakness of this approach is that the LPDC comes to be seen as biased, even
partisan, in its approach and that its call for ‘dialogue’ is delusional.
The LPDC is a quasi-political entity whose close ties to the government enables
it to bestow political patronage that confers both legitimacy and resources on its
partners. The main role of the LPDC during the Nahr el-Bared crisis was handling
the official dialogue and media contact on emergency relief to displaced refugees
and liaising with journalists and media agencies (LPDC 2008b). Additionally, the
Nahr el-Bared 103
LPDC role was to reassure the displaced refugees that no effort would be spared
to rebuild the ruined camp and their resettlement was temporary. When the conflict
ended, the LPDC’s main task was coordinating the relief effort, liaising with donors
and compiling the information and planning documents (aka Nahr el-Bared Master
Plan) needed for the international donor conference that would pave the way for the
camp’s reconstruction. The LPDC sought to stay above the political nature of the
crisis by dealing mainly with reconstruction and relief in close cooperation with
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near
East (UNRWA). The LPDC’s close ties with the government mandated that it toed
the official line of rejecting permanent settlement while at the same time calling
for humanitarian aid to displaced refugees. To do this effectively, the LPDC needed
the support from the PLO, which served as a guarantor that the LPDC acted in the
best interest of the Palestinians and their cause in Lebanon.
Hizbollah’s pragmatism
Hizbollah is Lebanon’s most influential political party (el Khazen 2003), and its
political wing, ‘Loyalty to the Resistance’, has been represented in the parliament
since 1992 (Hamzeh 2000). In the 2005 parliamentary elections, Hizbollah joined
the Future Movement in an electoral coalition list and, following their election vic-
tory, for the first time joined the new cabinet under Prime Minister Fouad Saniora.
Hizbollah has over the past years expanded its political constituency among the
refugees and is considered a stalwart against covert plans to settle the refugees in
Lebanon. Hizbollah has also supported the refugees’ right to bear arms inside the
refugee camps and made a common front against the United Nations Security Council
Resolution (1559) demanding demobilisation of Lebanese militias. In post-civil war
Lebanon, Hizbollah has become the Palestinian refugees’ staunchest supporter and
closest ally, professing strong solidarity with the Palestinians’ cause and support for
their right of return (see Høigilt 2007; Khalili 2007; Noe 2007).9 Hizbollah is one of
the few Lebanese parties that does not see the granting of civil rights to Palestinians
as being opposed to their ‘right of return’. Instead, improving their living condi-
tions is seen as a precondition for an effective campaign in favour of their right of
return. Hizbollah is therefore the only major non-Palestinian party that publicly
supports granting civil rights to the refugees and has tried to amend the ministerial
regulations barring Palestinians from a number of jobs (Knudsen 2009).
In a country where politicians are accused of embezzling public funds and empty
talk, Hizbollah is seen as trustworthy and true to its words, hence posters of Syeed
Hassan Nasrallah are seen in every refugee camp. Hizbollah maintains that it
remains neutral vis-à-vis the many Palestinian factions, but for reasons explained
above, is better connected to the Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad
than the secular parties PLO and Fateh. In addition to its political and ideological
support for refugees, Hizbollah is better placed than other groups to underwrite
political support with economic aid. In comparison, the secular groups (PLO,
Fateh) have seen their funding dwindle and are no longer able to compete with
the increased support from Islamist groups running kindergartens, social services
104 Are Knudsen
etc. in the camps. This has led to Hizbollah gaining in importance and popularity
at the PLO’s expense.
The strategic alignment between Hizbollah and the Palestinian rejectionist groups
was evident in the Nahr el-Bared crisis. Just prior to the outbreak of the Nahr el-
Bared crisis, Hizbollah’s second in command, Sheikh Naem Qassem, received a
Palestinian delegation of pro-Syrian factions and warned against the threat posed by
Fatah al-Islam, stressing the importance of keeping Palestinian and Lebanese issues
apart (Daily Star 2007i). He particularly underlined the need for preventing security
breaches that would have negative repercussions on the country. Qassem also used
the opportunity to voice his support for the right of return and the support for civil
rights on humanitarian grounds. The support to the refugees must not only be seen
within the framework of solidarity but also as a political statement in an increas-
ingly politicised environment surrounding the refugee issue and undocumented but
persistent rumours of settling the refugees in Lebanon.
On 25 May, as the Army siege was in place, Hizbollah leader Syeed Hassan
Nasrallah cautioned against storming the camp. In a televised address he said that
for the Army to enter the camp would be crossing a ‘red line’ and the Palestinians
should not be touched (BBC Online 2007). However, Nasrallah also warned against
attacking the Army, which he also considered a very important and impartial institu-
tion and a ‘red line’ not to be crossed. To solve the conflict, Hizbollah advocated a
negotiated political solution using the country’s judiciary. Shortly after, Hizbollah
organised its own relief effort and sent a convoy of 12 trucks with essential goods
to Tripoli to help displaced refugees (Zureik 2007). Despite Nasrallah’s warnings,
the Army stormed the camp in early June and continued to shell the camp until the
last Fatah al-Islam fighters were captured in late August. In the aftermath of the
Nahr el-Bared crisis, Nasrallah assured that his followers enjoyed ‘strong and good’
relations with Palestinian and stressed that ‘there would be no war between the
camps and their neighbours’. Similarly, Mohammad Husein Fadlallah, who as the
foremost Shia scholar and marjaah in Lebanon is close to Hizbollah (el-Husseini
2008), called for improving inter-Palestinian relations (Daily Star 2007k).
Hamas sidelined
In recent years Hamas has gained a more prominent role in Lebanon, in line with
the growing support for Islamist groups in the Middle East generally. The rise
of Hamas in Palestine has been followed by a similar increase in support among
the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon (Knudsen 2005b). Hamas is formally repre-
sented in southern refugee camps and active in running social programmes and
activities. Hamas’s victory in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council
(2006) increased its prominence in Lebanon. Under the leadership of the Country
Representative Oussama Hamdan, Hamas has strengthened the ties with the other
Palestinian rejectionist groups and in informal alliance with Hizbollah. Hamas’s
growing prominence has brought the group into competition with PLO over stew-
ardship of the Palestinian cause in Lebanon. The response to the Nahr el-Bared
crisis is typical of this disagreement and put Hamas at odds with the PLO.
Nahr el-Bared 105
Hamas disagreed with PLO (and Fateh) on how to handle the crisis. While the
latter strongly supported a military intervention, Hamas warned against a military
solution. Oussama Hamdan, Hamas’ political representative in Lebanon, argued
that a military solution to the crisis would lead to the camp’s destruction (Daily Star
2007d). Hamdan’s assessment was that it was not possible to reach a swift military
victory over Fatah al-Islam. Instead, a military solution would take months and
lead to the camp’s destruction and displace the residents. Hamas considered this a
humanitarian crisis that should be tackled accordingly. They therefore advocated
a three-pronged approach to the crisis, which entailed seeking a political solution
aided by social pressure and backed up by security forces. This approach would take
time, perhaps three months, but would avoid bloodshed and wanton destruction.
Hamas’ approach was never tried out and instead the LAF used excessive force to
reach its objective of routing Fatah al-Islam. The camp’s destruction vindicated
Hamas’ view that a political solution could have spared the camp and protected
the residents. Throughout the three-month’s battle Hamas remained critical of the
siege, but was unable to influence the course of events. One reason why Hamas was
sidelined was because it was not part of the LPDC, which functioned as the entry
point for influencing the government. Moreover, once the military campaign had
gained momentum, the Nahr el-Bared crisis had been militarised to a degree that
other approaches seemed impossible. The fact that the PLO gave the government
unconditional support further marginalised Hamas’ stance.
In general, the conflictual relations between Palestinian groups in Palestine have
not been replicated in a Lebanese context. However, the intensity of the Nahr el-
Bared campaign exerted tremendous pressure on the many Palestinian factions and
served to polarise them vis-à-vis each other. The parties criticising the siege of Nahr
el-Bared were therefore unable to cooperate in an efficient manner. This made it
impossible for them to take a united stand on the crisis although there was general
agreement that the Nahr el-Bared crisis should be considered a humanitarian issue
made worse by the Army using excessive force. Because of their principled stand
against a military engagement, Hamas was accused of helping the militants in Nahr
el-Bared. After the Nahr el-Bared crisis ended, Hamas and Hamdan dismissed accu-
sations by undisclosed Fateh sources that ‘Hamas helped Fatah al-Islam’ (Daily Star
2007b). Hamdan met with Bahia Hariri to discuss reconstruction of Nahr el-Bared
but, overall, both Hamas and the other Palestinian groups began the discussion on
reconstruction of the ruined camp much too late.
The PLO’s comeback

The PLO has for several years been struggling to regain its political prominence
in Lebanon and saw its political fortunes brighten in May 2006 with the reopening
of the new PLO representative office in Beirut that had been closed since 1982.
The reopening was an important symbolic gesture, and made Abbas Zaki (Sharif
Meshal) the official PLO representative in Lebanon. When the Nahr el-Bared cri-
sis broke out, the PLO was acknowledged as the official Palestinian delegate to
Lebanon and Zaki the only Palestinian delegate member of the LPDC with the title
106 Are Knudsen
of Ambassador. During the Nahr el-Bared conflict Zaki was the most visible and
eloquent supporter of the Army’s siege of the camp and the government’s handling
of the disaster. Zaki stressed the need to avoid turning the siege of Nahr el-Bared
into a massacre of civilians. He therefore purposely chose a conciliatory approach
aimed at protecting the refugees. Zaki believed that this was vital to protect the
camp’s residents as well as to prevent reprisals against civilians. He also saw this
as a necessary step to stem a political backlash against refugees that would further
curtail their minimal rights. Thus, his cautious support for the siege aimed to prevent
reprisals against the refugees. Zaki had history on his side, such as the war-time
destruction of the Tell al Zaatar refugee camp and massacre of its inhabitants in
1976. When the Nahr el-Bared crisis ended, the death toll stood at 33 civilians,
which can be read as a vindication of Zaki’s measured support of the LAF in order
to avoid reprisals against the besieged refugees.10
After the Nahr el-Bared crisis ended in August 2007, Zaki continued his concili-
atory approach through a speech commonly referred to as the ‘Beirut Declaration’
delivered on the occasion of ceremony in Beirut marking the forty-third anniver-
sary of Fatah (Zaki 2008). In his speech, Zaki made a unilateral apology to ‘our
dear Lebanon’ for the harm inflicted on the country during the civil war and called
for true reconciliation. The apology was followed by a critique of the PLO’s own
failure to address the needs of the refugees following the Oslo Process and DOP.
Preoccupied with the two-state solution, the PLO had let the refugee issue slip
from their agenda (Hovdenak 2008). Having reaffirmed the PLO’s commitment to
Palestinian refugees, Zaki underlined the respect for Lebanon’s laws, the right of
return and linked to this the commitment to a future Palestinian state. Zaki’s admis-
sion of the PLO’s failure and unilateral apology opened a new space for criticising
the government’s neglect of the refugees’ plight. Thus, the Beirut Declaration must
be interpreted within a framework of a near absence of formal apology and rec-
onciliation in post-civil war Lebanon (Barak 2007; Haugbolle 2005).11 But more
than that, the apology and call for reconciliation must be read as preparing the
ground for closer political co-operation and co-ordination between the PLO and
the Saniora government. It can also be interpreted as a strategy to strengthen the
PLO’s claim to be the ‘sole representative of the Palestinian people’ in a Lebanese
context. This view was strengthened by the many public appearances, joint press
conferences and press statements featuring Zaki together with the LPDC leader
Makkawi (LPDC 2008a).12 Thus, the Nahr-el Bared crisis opened the way for closer
relations between the government, the LPDC and the PLO. This effectively sidelined
Hamas while strengthening the PLO, thus reproducing the current void (in Palestine)
between the PLO and Hamas in a Lebanese context.13 In mid-November, Zaki met
with Mohhammed Hussein Fadlallah and assured him that he stood together with
‘Sayyed Fadlallah and [Hizbullah leader] Sayyed Nasrallah [in] thwart[ting] . . .
conflict and infighting’ (Daily Star 2007k). In short, Zaki struck alliances with the
government and the opposition that bolstered the PLO’s position. By reaching out
to both sides of Lebanon’s political divide (aka 14th March and 8th March), Zaki
cemented the PLO’s leadership role. Yet, Zaki and PLO achieved this political
victory at the expense of its grassroots support: many Palestinians resented his
Nahr el-Bared 107
unilateral apology as a betrayal of the suffering of Palestinian victims and their
families at the hands of the Lebanese.
Fatah’s failure
While the PLO’s political fortunes have brightened, the role of Fatah, the largest
faction within the PLO operating under separate command, has become more
tenuous. In recent years Fatah has seen its power-base inside Lebanese refugees
camps weaken, yet it routinely proclaims to be in control of the security situation
in country’s refugee camps (Daily Star 2008b). Yet, in several cases Fatah finds
itself outmanned and outgunned by rival Islamist groups and implicated in deadly
vendettas (Rougier 2007). Moreover, Fatah finds itself politically isolated from the
Palestinian ‘rejectionist’ groups who oppose Fatah’s (and the PLO’s) endorsement
of the Oslo Process. For this reason, Fatah has sought to strengthen its position by
controlling the camps in military terms but, unlike the PLO, it has not been able
form a strategic alliance with Lebanese political parties.
The appointment of Zaki as PLO Representative in Lebanon demoted Fatah
Commander (Brigadier) Sultan Abu al-Anayn, who until Zaki’s appointment was
the highest ranking PLO representative in Lebanon. This led to tensions between
Fatah and PLO and, later, to attempts to replace al-Anayn.14 While Zaki has been
cultivating and is cultivated by the ruling elite, al-Anayn is a former militia leader
who in 1992 was sentenced to death in absentia. He has since been based in his
command headquarters, the tightly guarded Fatah stronghold Rashidieh, a southern
refugee camp near Tyre. While the PLO has monopolised the political dialogue with
the Lebanese authorities, there is no comparable role for Fatah. Instead, Fatah and
al-Anayn are in charge of the internal security situation in the camps, and can be said
to be controlling, or aiming to control, the internal security dialogue in the camps.
Yet, this is made more difficult by Fatah’s being party to a deadly vendetta in the
Ayn al-Hilweh refugee camp (Knudsen 2005b). In this sense, Fatah is implicated
in the type of violence the state seeks to prevent. This effectively limits Fateh’s
political role vis-à-vis the Lebanese authorities, which consider Fatah a militia
rather than a political force and under multiple and competing local leadership
(Daily Star 2007f). Seeking to prove its military superiority, Fatah recently put on
display the largest array of heavy weapons inside a refugee camp since the end of
the civil war. This show of force was meant to silence its opponents and send a
message to its enemies in the camp (Daily Star 2008c). However, it is also sends
the message that Fatah is a militia group (rather than a political entity) hence part
of the problem rather than its solution.15
We can also see this in Fatah’s knee-jerk response to the threat posed by Fatah
al-Islam. Fatah al-Islam was strongly repudiated by all political groups and their
Islamist credentials questioned. The strongest repudiation came from Fatah al-
Islam’s Palestinian namesake Fatah, which denied the existence of any such group
named ‘Fatah al-Islam’. Fatah not only promised support for the Army’s siege of
the camp but offered to let its own force, the (Palestinian) Armed Struggle (al-Kifah
al-Musalah), enter the camp to fight alongside the Army. For Fatah especially, it
108 Are Knudsen
was important to discredit its namesake Fatah al-Islam as a ‘terrorist group’ without
any connection to Fatah or the Palestinian nationalist struggle. While Fatah’s offer
of armed intervention was not accepted, it shows how strongly Fatah distanced
itself from Fatah al-Islam and willingness to attack them.
Conclusion
The Nahr el-Bared conflict was the largest and most devastating confrontation
between the Army and the refugees in post-civil war Lebanon and highlighted
successive governments’ neglect of refugees and their plight. However, the Nahr
el-Bared incident also reshuffled the relations between refugees and the political
groups in Lebanon, the topic of this chapter. Nahr el-Bared was a ‘crisis within a
crisis’; a complex emergency that cemented the two-bloc system in Lebanese poli-
tics (namely 14th March, 8th March) and reinforced internal Palestinian divisions.
All the Palestinian parties delegitimised Fatah al-Islam but could not agree on how
to deal with the threat they posed to the Palestinian community: some supported
military intervention, others advocated a negotiated political settlement. Fatah, in
particular, remained ensnared in a militarised response to the crisis, a response that
typifies its militia organisation.
The Nahr el-Bared conflict showed the fractures and potential for conflict over
who is the steward of the ‘refugee file’ in Lebanon. Common to all the parties
is that they were guided not primarily by political visions, but more by political
calculations and party gains. Nahr el-Bared is therefore a potent symbol of the
powerlessness of the refugees – underlined by Abbas Zaki’s apologetic ‘Beirut
Declaration’ where he sought forgiveness for Palestinian crimes committed dur-
ing the civil war. The Beirut Declaration was approved by the PLO, reduced latent
political tensions created by the conflict and moved the PLO closer to the ruling
14th March coalition and the LPDC. Yet, for many refugees, the Beirut Declaration
was a sign of weakness and a betrayal. Nonetheless, the PLO’s conciliatory gestures
towards the Army managed to contain the wider impact of the crisis but did so at
the expense of its grassroots support and credibility.
The Nahr el-Bared crisis confirmed the Future Movement’s commitment to the
refugee issue but also the pitfalls of closer contact, which makes the movement lia-
ble to accusations of building a proxy force based on the Palestinian co-religionists.
The crisis further affirmed the personal role of Bahia Hariri not only on a local but
also a national level but did not bestow a comparable role on the Future Movement.
Hariri also sought closer cooperation with Hamas, which indicates that to Hariri,
Hamas is a credible alternative to the governmental embrace of the PLO and can
provide electoral gains in her Sidon constituency.
Hamas’ cautious political response to the crisis was vindicated by the outcome
of the conflict, yet it was unable to see this approach adopted by the government.
Excluded from government patronage and membership in the LPDC, Hamas sought
closer cooperation with the Future Movement, in particular Bahia Hariri, an alter-
native to the LPDC-channel monopolised by the PLO. Nonetheless, Hamas was
sidelined and was never able to gain broad-based support for a political solution
Nahr el-Bared 109
to the conflict. This is all the more significant considering that Hizbollah also
advocated a political solution to the crisis.
For Hizbollah, there are important ideological reasons for being in control of
the ‘refugee file’ that go beyond the voting power as political constituencies; this
is hence about legitimacy and national politics and carving into votes otherwise
distributed along sectarian lines. As the country’s only modern party Hizbollah
reaches out beyond the sectarian divide to attract new voters, supporters and sym-
pathizers. Hizbollah called for lifting the siege of Nahr el-Bared and challenged
the Army’s heavy-handed military campaign but did not engage militarily in the
standoff. In this respect, Hizbollah stayed within the official consensus that Fatah
al-Islam had to be defeated militarily and displayed the political pragmatism that
is the hallmark of the movement.
At the outbreak of the Nahr el-Bared crisis the Palestinian ‘rejectionists’ groups
already had a close relationship with Hizbollah. Likewise the secular groups, in
particular the PLO, found a natural ally in the LPDC. Yet, within both groups
there is now greater interest in claiming the refugee file for themselves. More
specifically, the control of the ‘refugee file’ is sought by new contenders, such as
the Future Movement under Bahia Hariri. The Nahr el-Bared conflict made the
refugee file become even more important and controlling it therefore all the more
crucial. The ‘refugee file’ is not sought after as a ‘vote bank’, but as a key, divisive
national issue whose stewardship gives political gains. So what are these gains?
The long-time presence of Palestinians and potential settlement in Lebanon is one
of the most controversial issues in Lebanon – to be seen as controlling this sensit-
ive issue has tactical advantages and ‘power’ benefits. These benefits are largest
in Sunni-majority cities such as Tripoli and Sidon where the Palestinian issue can
be used as a political ‘card’ to garner votes in the local power struggle between
the contestants (Daily Star 2009). The Palestinian issue speaks to the Sunni ‘street’
and being perceived as controlling the ‘refugee file’ is therefore an asset. The Nahr
el-Bared conflict further heightened the stakes of controlling the ‘refugee file’. The
crisis also gave the LAF a greater stake in controlling the ‘refugee file’ and the LAF
now has a greater say in refugee affairs than before. This has made Nahr el-Bared
the country’s most securitised and surveilled camp and the residents suspended in
chronic insecurity.
Acknowledgements
This chapter was written under the Research Council of Norway grant no. 171546/
V10. I am grateful to Jaber Suleiman for organising interviews with leading
Lebanese and Palestinian officials and representatives during 2006–8. I would
like to thank Mahmoud Zeidan for organising my visits to the Nahr el-Bared and
Beddawi refugee camps in September 2008. The usual disclaimer applies.
110 Are Knudsen
Notes
1 The Free Patriotic Movement (a Christian Party) is, however, supportive of basic
Palestinian rights as detailed in the party’s Memorandum of Understanding with
Hizbollah (MoU 2006).
2 The ‘rejectionist’ groups are also referred to as the Palestinian National Alliance, see
Suleiman (1999).
3 The Fatah al-Islam leader, Shaker al-Absi, began his career as a PLO member and, from
1982, joined the break-away faction Fatah Intifada. After serving a three-year sentence
in jail in Syria and receiving a death-in-absentia sentence from Jordan, he returned to
Lebanon in 2005 and took up leadership of Fatah Intifada (Daily Star 2007c). A few
months later, Fatah al-Islam had established itself in Nahr el-Bared and took over Fatah
Intifada’s premises in the camp.
4 Future TV, Radio Orient and the Al Mustaqbal newspaper.
5 In mid-2008 Bahia Hariri was appointed Minister of Education in the new ‘unity cabinet’
headed by Prime Minister Saniora.
6 Sidon also hosts the smaller and less well-known refugee camp Mieh-Mieh, which also
suffers occasional flare-ups between Fatah and Islamist groups and was the scene of the
assassination of the senior Fatah official Kamal Midhat in late March 2009 (Knudsen
2010).
7 Taamir is a troubled neighbourhood adjacent to the Ayn al-Hilwa refugee camp, where
militant Islamist groups, in particular the Jund e-Sham (Soldiers of Greater Syria), have
fortified themselves. There have been several attempts at evicting them with peaceful
means following political dialogue. The group has been implicated in a deadly vendetta
with Fatah members and several of the group’s members have been killed in shoot-outs
and targeted assassinations, see Rougier (2007).
8 This includes, among others, the former prime ministers Omar Karami and Najib
Mikati.
9 Every year Hizbollah celebrates the future liberation of Palestine in the Al-Quds
International Day parade held on the last day Friday of Ramadan.
10 In the end, reprisals against refugees were averted, and the official view prevailed:
Palestinian leaders would not criticise the government for destroying the camp – the
government, in return, would not put blame for the Nahr el-Bared crisis on the refugees.
Instead, both parties could claim to be victims of a militant group threatening the state
and its citizens and its Palestinian ‘non-citizens’ (Saniora 2007).
11 Reconciliation and remembrance has over the past years gained momentum in Lebanon,
see for example the website http://memoryatwork.org/.
12 By comparison, there were no similar appearances of Makkawi with the Hamas
representative in Lebanon, Oussama Hamdan or other Palestinian leaders.
13 A further example of this can be found in the fact that in the annual Sabra and Shatila
commemorations, Abbas Zaki was present but did not, as would be expected, deliver the
key speech on the occasion. According to one observer, Zaki declined to speak because
he did not want to engage in the diatribe against the Lebanese state that is common on
this occasion (author’s observation, Beirut, 16 September 2008).
14 A note claimed that an envoy of President Mahmoud Abbas’s had relieved Abu al-
Anayan of his duties (Daily Star 2008a). The note was later refuted by Abbas Zaki,
yet is evidence of the tensions between the PLO and Fatah leadership (NOWLebanon
2008c).
15 The car-bomb killing of Fatah official Kamal Midhat in March 2009 further weakened
Fatah’s political role. Midhat was the key broker of the behind-the-scenes initiatives to
unite the PLO and Fatah and sought closer cooperation with Hamas.
Part III
Civic rights, legal status
and reparations
7 Passport for what price?
Statelessness among
Palestinian refugees
Abbas Shiblak
These forgotten ones, disconnected from the social fabric, these outcasts,
deprived of work and equal rights, are at the same time expected to applaud
their oppression because it provides them with the blessings of memory.
The late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish
Introduction
Following the establishment of Israel in 1948, Palestinian refugees lost both their
homes and their citizenship. At present, the majority of Palestinians are not only
refugees but also stateless. They constitute the largest stateless community in the
world. Statelessness, perhaps more than any other factor, has dominated and shaped
the lives of four generations of Palestinian refugees since their exodus in 1948.
This chapter focuses on this aspect of Palestinian experience that was overlooked
and kept at bay for so long while attention focused on the political aspects of the
refugee plight.
This chapter begins by discussing the impact of denial of statehood on the
Palestinians and how citizenship or lack of it has been used to determine the des-
tiny of ordinary Palestinians and influence the resolution of the refugee question. It
looks into the impact of statelessness on the wellbeing and mobility of Palestinian
refugees. Second, it examines the shifting concepts of citizenship in the Palestinian
and official Arab rhetoric as well as among the refugees themselves. It also examines
the significance of citizenship in any future political settlement and highlights some
the shortcomings of the various formats being presented to resolve this issue.
Denial of statehood and Palestinian citizenship

Palestinians in the late nineteenth century, like all inhabitants of the Empire, were
Ottoman subjects. In his study of Palestinian emigration to America at the turn of
the twentieth century, Jamal Adawi (1993) mentioned that the Ottoman authorities
withdrew, in most cases, the nationality of Palestinian emigrants once they acquired
American nationality. When Palestine fell under the British Mandate, after the First
World War, all persons, legally resident and registered, became British Protected
114 Abbas Shiblak
subjects and were granted Palestinian nationality. The British mandate authorities,
however, denied thousands of Palestinians who emigrated to the Americas under the
Ottoman period, Palestinian nationality and even barred their entry into the country.
This is in stark contrast to the position the British took in the 1920s and 1930s
when newly arriving Jewish immigrants were granted Palestinian nationality. This
was part of the British policy in support of the establishment of a ‘Jewish home’ in
Palestine. Based on figures included in the Palestine Royal Commission Report of
1937, Adawi (1993) and Qaffisheh (2007) give conflicting figures for those who
were denied Palestinian nationality among Palestinian emigrants. Adawi (1993)
found that of the 9,000 Palestinian emigrants to America who decided to return at
the time, only 100 were allowed back into the country (Adawi 1993; Yazbak 1988).
Qaffisheh (2007) in his study of Palestinian nationality gave a much higher figure
of 40,000 for what could be the number of Palestinian emigrants in Latin America
who applied to get Palestinian passport at the time.1
Citizenship in the two states – Jewish and Arab – proposed in 1947 by the United
Nations (UN) Partition Plan that comprised in UN resolution 181, was meant to be
granted to all inhabitants of each of the two states. This was also meant to include
full equality of rights and freedom from discrimination based on ethnic or religious
grounds. When Britain abruptly ended its mandate on 15 May 1948, Palestinian
statehood never materialised. Israel extended its control of 20 per cent more land
than had been demarcated for the Jewish State under the UN Partition Plan. At the
same time, Jordan annexed the central area of Palestine, which began to be known
as the ‘West Bank’. The de facto annexation by Jordan was never recognised by
any member state of the League of Arab States (LAS) or by the UN. Pakistan was
the only state that officially recognised this annexation. Based on evidence of the
Zoinist archives, Shlaim (1988) highlighted what he called ‘the collusion across
the Jordan river’ between the Israeli leadership with King Abdullah of Jordan at
the time. Thus, one might say that the eradication of Palestine as a political and
national entity from 1948 was in fact a joint effort between Israel and Jordan. It
was left for the successive states to determine the entitlement of Palestinians to
nationality. Jordan was quick, as one scholar describes it, ‘to cloth’ the Palestinian
refugees in Jordanian nationality (Al-Kasim 2001).
It is now widely recognised that the Israeli policy was, and still is, to gain control
of as much land in historical Palestine and expel as many Palestinians as possible
through intimidation and the use of force (Masalha 1992). Only about 150,000
Palestinians remained after the mass exodus of 1948. To ensure the Judaization of
the new state, Israel issued three new laws in the early 1950s pertaining to Israeli
citizenship. The full implications of the Israeli Citizenship Law of 1952 can be
assessed only in conjunction with two other laws, which were issued two years
previously in 1950: the Absentees’ Property Law and the Law of Return. While
the Absentees’ Property Law nullifies the rights of the Palestinian (non-Jewish)
population, who were made refugees in the 1948 war, to return to their homes, it
stipulates in parallel, through the Law of Return, the right of any Jew (and only
Jews) who has never lived in or set foot in Palestine to unrestricted immigration,
settlement and automatic citizenship (Davis 1997).
Passport for what price? 115
Thus, within a few years after the establishment of the state of Israel, thousands
of Palestinians had been made stateless refugees. Those who had left in fear for
their lives, during the war-related violence, were not allowed back and consequently
became stateless refugees. Those left behind were not considered citizens of the
newly born state but rather foreign residents who were later naturalised. Some of
them remained stateless until the 1980s (Davis 1997: 34). More recently, some
Israeli officials have called for changes to nationality laws that would allow the
government to strip Arab citizens of the Israeli state of their nationality (Bishara
2007). It has been pointed out by some scholars that by granting civil and political
rights and withholding social and economic rights, Israel was able to present itself
as a democracy. Yet, veiled from public scrutiny, its apartheid legislation subjected
Palestinian society outside of Israel to a miserable refugee existence and those
inside Israel to policies of internal colonisation (Zureik 1979: 59).
With the West Bank under the control of the Jordanian army, the Palestinians man-
aged only to set up their own government known as ‘Government of All Palestine’
(GAP), in the Gaza enclave under the Egyptian administration. GAP issued a
Palestinian passport to facilitate the movement of Palestinians. This remained in
limited use until the early 1960s (Azar 1998). Jordan objected to GAP while the
initial limited support offered by other Arab states showed a rapid decline. This was
largely because of colonial influence on the newly emerging Arab states. Hence,
this at the time facilitated the Zionists’ objective of eradicating Palestine both as a
notion and as a nation. The inability of the Palestinians to have their own state in
areas that were not controlled by Israel led to a loss of citizenship. Consequently,
there was no representation in the view of international law. This had grave polit-
ical, legal and human repercussions on the Palestinian refugees and shaped their
experience in exile. It was implicit understanding by both Israel and Jordan that
sought to erase Palestine as a political entity and inherit its land.
Israel resorted to similar dubious policies after it occupied the remaining terri-
tories of historical Palestine; the West Bank and the Gaza Strip following the 1967
War. Official Palestinian figures show that 412,660 Palestinians were displaced
directly after the war (Amro 1996: 14). Israel, in contravention of/in breach of
international law, once again designated the Palestinian inhabitants of the newly
occupied territories not as non-citizens but rather as foreign residents. More than
150,000 Palestinians, who were living outside the territories during the war, were
not counted in the census that the Israelis had conducted immediately after the
war (Amro 1996: 14). These Palestinians consequently lost their civil registra-
tion and they were not allowed back to their homes. The inhabitants of the West
Bank, where the majority at the time had Jordanian nationality, were treated as
non-citizens. Despite its implicit agreement on Jordanian annexation of the West
Bank, Israel did not officially recognise Jordanian sovereignty over the territory. It
applied military rule to the territories and issued a series of military orders. These
orders enabled Israel to withdraw the IDs from thousands of Palestinians whose exit
visa, issued by Israeli authorities, had expired while they were out of the occupied
territories. This action by the Israelis can only be described as ‘ethnic cleansing’
through administrative means.
116 Abbas Shiblak
With the annexation of East Jerusalem (1967) and the Golan Heights (1981),
Israel applied its civil legislation to the annexed territories as well. The residents of
these territories became permanent residents of Israel, permanent residents rather
than citizens. In order to become citizens, they were required, under Israeli law,
to apply for Israeli citizenship. Granting of this citizenship remained under the
discretion of the Minister of the Interior. Israel employed Article 11 of the regula-
tions on Entry into Israel of 1974 as a legal instrument. The aim was to deprive
many Jerusalemite Arabs of their IDs and residency rights. Israel said they would
lose their IDs if any of the following applies: (a) they were away for more than
seven years, (b) had acquired other citizenship; or (c) had been granted permanent
residency rights elsewhere (Halabi 1997). More than 17 years now after the sign-
ing of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) in 1993, Israel still keeps total control
on the border crossings of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and on issuing IDs for
Palestinians without which they cannot reside in PA areas. The ID issue, as well
as the Separation Wall, are in fact part of a comprehensive control regime of the
space and the people that Israel employs vis-à-vis Palestinians. This causes frag-
mentation and evacuation, which is worse than that under the apartheid regime of
South Africa. Not only does it demonise the Palestinians, but denies their existence
altogether.
Citizenship as a political instrument in the Palestinian

context
It is one of many misfortunes that the Palestinians had to flee their country at the
time when the neighbouring Arab states were busy controlling their own borders,
which had been drawn by the colonial powers. Dispossessed and stateless the
refugees tried to absorb the shock of their ‘nakba’, the Arabic term for disaster.
They found themselves stranded and unable to travel in search for work or to link
up with family members dispersed across the region. Thus, families and small
communities were split and with it the destinies of their members.
The Israeli government introduced further measures in summer 2010 that will
deny citizenship and family reunification for thousands of Palestinian families
across the Green Line. This will affect around 25,000 Palestinian families of mixed
marriages where one partner holds Palestinian ID and resides in PA areas and the
other holds an Israeli passport and resides in Israel or Jerusalem. The proposed
measures will also affect Palestinian families if the parents carry different Palestinian
ID cards, one of Gaza and the other of the West Bank. These measures are designed
to cause further fragmentation and family splits among Palestinians and can only
be seen as a step backwards, signalling that Israel no longer recognizes Gaza and
the West Bank as one political entity as agreed in the signed peace accord.
It took more than a decade for Arab states to realise that a solution to the refugee
crisis was not in sight. They had to agree on some kind of regularisation for the
travel, family reunification and residency status of the refugee communities in their
midst. The member states of the LAS adopted the Casablanca Protocol of September
1965 in which they agreed in principle to grant Palestinian refugees full social and
economic rights equal to that of their own citizens (LAS 1996, 1998). The member
states also agreed to provide the refugees with special travel documents issued by
the host Arab government without granting them their nationality.
It was a formula designed to alleviate the refugees’ plight while preserving
the refugees’ identity and serve as a reminder of the responsibility of Israel for
the creation of the refugee crisis. It was thought this would also serve to remind
the international community of its responsibility in resolving the refugee issue
in accordance with the UN resolutions including the UN General Assembly Res.
194 of 1948 that enshrined the refugees’ rights to repatriation and compensation.
Perhaps it was a well-intended formula at the time but it was never a part of any
Arab strategy to help those refugees to return to their homes. Gradually, like many
of the LAS resolutions, it was left, though not officially, for each government to
decide on what and how to implement the Protocol. It was consequently only
partially and occasionally implemented. Fundamental rights of the refugees were
crossly compromised in various degrees in host Arab countries. With the exception
of Syria, most Arab states imposed various degrees of restrictions on entry visa
for the travel document (TD) holders. As TD holders, refugees in Lebanon, Syria,
Egypt and Gaza found that their eligibility to work and their freedom of movement
in other Arab countries were gradually curtailed. The holders of Palestinian TDs
issued by other countries were mostly prohibited from entry to Jordan, Lebanon
or Egypt. Lebanon and Saudi Arabia expressed reservations on the Casablanca
Protocol as both countries feared that this might lead to permanent settlement of
Palestinian refugees in the Arab host states. Lebanon, in particular, feared that the
Palestinian presence would add to its Muslim Sunni population and hence would
alter its volatile sectarian political system. As a result, Lebanon developed what is
fundamentally a discriminatory regime that sought gradually but steadily to push
Palestinians out of Lebanon seeking refuge in countries beyond the Arab world. This
would happen under a misleading objective not to allow the refugees permanent
settlement, in Arabic referred to as ‘tawteen’, which literary means ‘implantation’)
by denying them basic human rights.
The political argument commonly used by some Arab officials to justify the
denial of basic rights has been to preserve the identity of the refugees and to make
sure that they will not permanently settle in Arab states. This is an argument that
Palestinians feel often conceals a sinister domestic agenda. This agenda entails
maintaining a political system that is largely based on a tribal and sectarian set-
up where ‘outsiders’ are seen as a threat and fear is used to control people. More
importantly perhaps, this state of affairs is pushing Palestinian refugees beyond
the Arab region and, in so doing, it inadvertently fulfils one of the objectives of
the Zionist ideology, namely the dispersal of Palestinian refugees away from their
homeland. Hence, the Arab political argument is designed to mislead and does not
in any way serve its stated purpose of preserving Palestinian identity. In effect it
deprives Palestinian refugees of basic human rights. It has been a formula that kept
the refugees in limbo for the third and fourth generations without bringing the reso-
lution of their plight any closer. The refugees therefore were neither able to return
to their homeland, because of Israeli objection, nor were incorporated or treated
118 Abbas Shiblak
equally with the citizens of host Arab societies. This pushed many Palestinians
towards exile abroad.
With the start of their journey in exile, the Palestinian refugees’ search for pass-
ports had started in earnest. With no Palestinian state in sight and the Palestinian
passport issued by the GAP gradually losing official recognition, Arab states became
more willing to accept Jordanian passports for Palestinians as de facto. Refugees
who found themselves in other countries were encouraged to come to Jordan in
their search for a passport. Prominent Palestinian figures, the wealthy and profes-
sionals were all lured to Jordan and acquire Jordanian nationality. Some were
offered official posts in the Jordanian government. It was a state of loss, confusion
and search for survival at a time when Palestine as an idea, a country and an entity
was dismantled and inherited by the Zionist forces and by the Jordanian army. The
Bedouin Jordanian army, which was led by British officers at the time, was round-
ing up activist nationalists among Palestinians in the West Bank and monitoring
any opposition activities among the population as well as in the camps, keeping
the borders with Israel quiet. Those who were suspected of political activities dur-
ing 1950s and 1960s had to spend a long time in jail and were asked to publicly
renounce their political affiliation before they were issued with new passport and
allowed to travel.
Passports are increasingly perceived not only as means of identification but more
as means of control for ensuring the loyalty to the government of the day. Borders
control and visa restrictions caused further fragmentation of the Palestinian society
now turned into scattered communities in exile. Palestinians who were residing
in Israel found themselves (until 1967) living under military rule, besieged by the
Israeli army and not being able to travel or even to communicate with other Arabs
or with relatives in the neighbouring Arab countries. They were even boycotted
by Arab states for holding new Israeli passports. Nevertheless, unlike TD holders,
Palestinian refugees who were holding Jordanian passports were able to travel in
Arab countries with less difficulty and were being granted visas to work in the Gulf
States, privileges that were not always available to the TD holders.
The regulations regarding the status of the Palestinian refugees were rarely issued
in the form of new laws by the legislature, but instead, as administrative decrees
taken by the executive or the security agencies that pay lip-service to the needs and
interest of the refugees or help their cause. These decrees were mostly arbitrary and
without judicial review or any possibility of being challenged. A sudden change
of heart by host governments as a result of political conflict with the Palestine
Liberation Organization’s (PLO) leadership followed with collective punishment of
ordinary Palestinians ensuing on more than one occasion. Their status was redefined
from residents with full citizenship rights to foreigners whose residency status is
uncertain or insecure. The civil and social rights they enjoyed for three decades
were withdrawn overnight in Egypt in 1979, against the backdrop of the political
rift with the PLO following the Egyptian–Israeli peace accords.
In Jordan, the late King Hussein used Jordanian citizenship as a way to gain influ-
ence among the stateless Palestinians and to exert pressure on the PLO. He offered,
for instance, the notables of Gaza Jordanian nationality in the late 1960s and early
1970s as part of his efforts to undermine the support base of the PLO. At a later
stage, in 1988, when it became clear that the Palestinian National Council (PNC)
was going to adopt a declaration calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state
in the West Bank and Gaza, once Israel ended its occupation of these territories,
the king issued a royal decree on 31 July surrendering his claim to the West Bank
and severing legal and administrative ties with it. The nullification of the 1950
unity of the two sides of the river Jordan, which was initially imposed then on the
Palestinians, triggered major changes in the legal status of West Bank residents.
Article (2) of the royal decree stipulates: ‘Every person residing in the West Bank
before 31st July 1988 is to be considered a Palestinian, not a Jordanian citizen.’
As a result, more than two million Palestinians living in the West Bank who were
carrying Jordanian passports effectively became stateless overnight (Bakr 1995).
The intention from the outset seemed to be accepting the wishes of Palestinians
whom the king never consulted yet the outcome appeared to punish them, since
there was no Palestinian state in existence as yet.
Consequently, what is considered to be a preservation of the refugee identity
instead becomes a legal instrument that excludes and marginalises Palestinian
refugee communities in host Arab states and turns them into ‘legislative ghettos’.
The Gulf States fired the last shot by officially revoking the Casablanca Protocol
when the LAS Council convened in 1991, agreeing that domestic laws of each
country should from now on have priority (LAS 1996, 1998).2 The agreement
lifted any legal or moral obligations on LAS members to be bound by the Protocol.
Even when nationality laws were amended in some Arab countries to allow certain
previously excluded or stateless groups to be naturalised, Palestinian refugees were
excluded on political grounds. Both Lebanon and Egypt, for instance, under certain
conditions allow the granting of nationality to newly born stateless children. Yet,
if the father is a stateless Palestinian, his children are excluded. The more recent
amendment in Egypt of 2004 to the 1975 Egyptian nationality law allows children
of an Egyptian woman who is married to a non-Egyptian to have Egyptian nation-
ality under certain conditions in an attempt to reduce statelessness. However, in
practice, the authorities choose to refuse application if the father of the children is
a stateless Palestinian. Although the amendment does not explicitly mention this,
it has been reported that the Ministry of Interior has the full discretion to refuse
applications for children born to an Egyptian mother and a stateless Palestinian
father. This seems ironic as the majority of mixed marriages are with Palestinian
men holding a TD and the authorities do, however, accept applications if the father
is a Palestinian bearing another nationality, e.g. Jordanian.3
In 1994, the Lebanese authorities clearly stated that the amendment to the nation-
ality law, which resulted in the naturalisation of over 100,000 foreigners, excluded
Palestinians from benefiting from the scheme. The row and debates that followed
this amendment are still ongoing. It was reported recently that the Lebanese govern-
ment may be forced to withdraw nationality from some people, mainly Palestinians,
‘who may have slipped through the net in the process’.4
Some of the Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia, have been giving contradic-
tory signals as to whether the recent nationality law amendment of 2005,5 which
120 Abbas Shiblak
allows foreign residents to be naturalised under certain conditions, includes stateless
Palestinians. On the other hand, Jordan, unlike in 1948, refused to grant Jordanian
citizenship or at least passports of convenience to the displaced Palestinians from
Gaza. Additionally, there are the estimated 60,000 who found themselves in Jordan
following 1967 War (Al-Abed 2002). They used to have Egyptian TDs but were
barred from entry to Egypt or to Gaza as they were not included in the census carried
out by the Israelis following their occupation of the Strip in 1967.
The impact of statelessness

The right to nationality is a fundamental human right. Article 15 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 lays the foundation by declaring ‘everyone
has the right to a nationality’. Citizenship is nothing less than what Marshall and
others described: ‘the right to have rights . . . Remove this priceless possession and
there remains a stateless person, disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his country-
men’ (Marshall 1950). It is the right from which other rights and entitlements derive,
especially in developing countries where entitlement to basic rights is strongly
linked to nationality rather than residency as in liberal democracies in Europe and
the United States (Castles and Davidson 2000). These include the right to educa-
tion, medical care, work, property ownership, travel, registration of civil matters,
state protection and full participation in a world composed of states. Changing
the status of people to non-citizens or threatening the security of their residency
status with little consideration given to the rule of law generates insecurity and a
loss of control over one’s life. Its devastating impact leaves a deep psychological
and social imprint for generations. The Independent Commission on International
Humanitarian Issues (1988) rightly notes that ‘the stateless are less protected than
refugees’ (UNHCR 1988).
Institutional discrimination leads to marginalisation, social exclusion, and vulner-
ability of stateless communities. Stateless communities are the first to pay the price
for political instability and insecurity in the countries in which they reside. Without
access to education or employment, stateless communities are exposed to politi-
cal manipulation, exploitation, black market conditions, poverty and social unrest.
The effect on host societies cannot be ignored. Statelessness leads to social tension
and regional instability. There is a positive correlation in the Middle East between
large-scale displacement and the eruption of major conflicts. Impoverished and
marginalised refugee communities remain one of the main destabilising factors in the
region. This has no better illustration than in the case of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Discrimination and denial of rights for Palestinian refugees in host Arab states
have often been justified as ‘a political necessity to keep their cause and iden-
tity alive’. Commenting ironically on such a view, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud
Darwish (1995: 16) describes the plight of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon,
which he experienced while living their in the 1970s. The reality is, however, that
such policies failed to bring any durable solution to the refugee problem. To the
contrary, it creates further misery and hardship on the refugees and pushes thousands
of them out of the host Arab societies to seek work, security and equality beyond
the Arab region. This has been better expressed by a young Palestinian who sought
asylum in the UK in these words:
Being uprooted from one’s own homeland is a devastating experience. To live

as a stateless [person], deprived of basic rights in the country of refuge, means
that you are doomed. By being uprooted, you may have lost the past; by losing
your basic rights, you are losing the future as well.6
The majority of the Palestinian communities in Europe, for instance, are holders
of Lebanese and Egyptian TDs, thus they have left countries where armed conflicts
and discrimination are more persistent and stronger (Shiblak 2005). Today restric-
tions are imposed in various degrees in most Arab countries, affecting the outlook
of generations of refugees in exile especially in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and the Gulf
States where these countries’ respective governments pursue a strict policy of exclu-
sion. Their engagement in host societies and their contribution are severely curtailed
while their freedom of movement and their rights to family reunification are largely
compromised. Statelessness to a large extent, perhaps more than any other factor,
has shaped the experience of these communities in exile for generations.
The emergence of the Palestinian resistance groups in the late 1960s and the
1970s as a powerful movement that speaks out on behalf of the Palestinians, and
the political turbulence that swept the region as a result of the Gulf wars, added
further complications to the status of the Palestinian refugees. The fluctuation of
the relation between the PLO and Arab governments had adverse effects on the
status of the Palestinians in these countries. Armed conflict between the PLO and its
local supporters in Jordan in 1970 and in Lebanon during 1975–82 had a profound
effect on the Palestinian communities in these countries that led to large influx and
more restrictive policies towards the Palestinians. Differentiation between the PLO
leadership and the ordinary Palestinians became more and more blurred in the eyes
of the predominantly autocratic and sectarian regimes.
There were extremely restrictive measures against Palestinians, some of which
can be described as having an element of vengeance, including mass expulsion
and even massacres in some cases. Palestinians experienced these in various Arab
countries at different times. For example, in Jordan following the military assault on
the PLO resistance factions in 1970–1 many were killed and around 50,000 where
forced to leave and their passports withdrawn or not renewed. This led to a new
phenomenon of undocumented Palestinians that currently exists in Lebanon, Syria,
Iraq, Libya and some of the Gulf States. The disagreement between the Egyptian
government and the PLO (after the signing of the peace agreement between Egypt
and Israel in 1979) was followed by the expulsion of hundreds of Palestinian who
were studying or residing in Egypt at the time. The massacres in the Sabra and
Shatila refugee camps in September 1982 in Lebanon targeted Palestinians and were
carried out by Maronite militias supported by the Israel army. More than 500,000 of
Palestinians in Kuwait and other Gulf States during 1991–2 were expelled because
due to PLO leadership’s support of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (Shiblak 1991).
The expulsion of around 15,000 Palestinians from Libya in the summer of 1995
122 Abbas Shiblak
was due to the dissatisfaction by the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, with the
Palestinian–Israeli peace agreement of 1993 (Shiblak 1995). Recently following
the war on Iraq in 2003, Palestinians in Iraq have had to endure various sectarian
acts of vengeance including killing, evacuation and deportation at the hands of
armed militias.
The issue of protection

At present about ten million Palestinians are de jure stateless persons. They fall
broadly into four main groups:
1 Holders of the ‘refugee travel document’ issued by host Arab states that include
Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq.
2 Holders of the passport of convenience, mostly temporary Jordanian passports
held mainly some inhabitants of the West Bank including Jerusalem who still
carry Jordanian passport for convenience but not prove of citizenship by the
Jordanian authorities.
3 Holders of the Palestinian passport/TD issued by the PA, which is still considered
a TD until a fully fledged Palestinian state comes to existence.
4 Unknown number of undocumented refugees in various Arab countries whose
documents were not renewed by the host countries that issued them. Also
Palestinians who exceed time allowed by Israel on their visit visas and live
without valid documents in PA-controlled areas.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is based on a continuous pro-
cess of land grabbing, fragmentation and displacement of the Palestinians. This
problem is magnified by the uncertainty facing Palestinians’ residency status in
some Arab states. More than 200,000 Gazans with Egyptian TDs were stranded
in countries such as the Gulf States, Jordan and at the international border ports
of almost every Arab state. Moreover, undocumented and unregistered refugees
in Lebanon and Syria who fled persecution in countries of first refuge are unable
to regularise their visas, travel or even move outside the camp. They are sim-
ply denied entry or renewal of their documents from their first country of refuge
(Frontiers 2005). They are effectively ‘non-documented’ refugees. A number of the
40,000–50,000 Palestinians who entered the PA-controlled areas are still without
valid documents as their application for family reunification has either been denied
or not yet been determined by the Israeli authorities, thus they are confined to their
homes and risk being arrested at Israeli checkpoints.7 Hundreds of Palestinian
families that are TD holders from Egypt or Iraq were stranded following the inva-
sion of Iraq in 2003 on the borders with Jordan and Syria in harsh desert camps.
They found no refuge in the neighbouring Arab countries and had to settle in third
countries that were not known as settlement countries for refugee in the past such
as Brazil, Chile and Iceland (UNHCR 2008).
This phenomenon of unwanted and stranded Palestinian communities illustrates
the human costs they have endured as a result of their statelessness. There is growing
awareness by the international community and human rights agencies that the
statelessness aspect of the Palestinian refugees should be recognised and they
should no longer be excluded from the international protection regime and relevant
instruments of international law. This includes the conventions related to refugees
and stateless persons, which should apply to the Palestinian refugees too (Akram
and Goodwin-Gill 2000). Indeed, on the applicability to Palestinian refugees of
Article 1(d) of the 1951 Convention relating to the status of Refugees, the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in October 2002, adopted
the view that the Convention should apply to Palestinian refugees beyond the five
areas of UNRWA operation; namely Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip (UNHCR 2002). This also explains why the agency recently decided
to include more than half a million Palestinians living in the Gulf States under its
protection and to expand the agency’s activities to Palestinians in Iraq, Libya and
Kuwait, especially those living in the border camps (UNHCR 2007).
It is important to note that Palestinian refugees’ dependence on international aid is
accelerating at an alarming rate. The crippled economy and harsh conditions in the PA-
controlled areas, especially in Gaza as a result of the ongoing Israeli siege, destruction
and the ongoing restrictions on work and freedom of movement of the Palestinian
labour force by Israel as well as in most Arab countries, have made Palestinians
inhabitants of PA areas more dependent on international aid. More Palestinian refu-
gees presently rely on international relief assistance than at any other time since 1967
War. More than 80 per cent of the refugees in Gaza and more than half of those in the
West Bank rely on food aid. On the other hand, more Palestinians presently live under
the poverty line and more than half of their labour force is unemployed in Gaza and
Lebanon (Grandi 2007). Such dependency on international aid would indeed leave
psychological and social scars and a loss of dignity among the Palestinians refugee
communities and impact on their ability to sustain themselves.
The form of economic incorporation of a specific group into society clearly has
a decisive bearing on their overall situation and wellbeing including emigration.
Statelessness is a major ‘push’ factor leading to large-scale migration and displace-
ment. There is a positive correlation between statelessness and asylum seeking in
industrial countries. The number of young Palestinian men ready to risk their lives
on the shores of the Mediterranean and South East Asia in order to seek asylum,
illustrates, among other things, the quest for security of citizenship and to escape
from the daily humiliation and the uncertainty that statelessness causes. It is almost
impossible at present for any Palestinian TD holders to be allowed entry to the
main labour market in the Gulf States if he does not live and work there already. It
should be noted that the majority of the around 250,000 or so Palestinians living
in Europe today are stateless holders of Lebanese and Egyptian TD or expired
Israeli laissez passer documents (Shiblak 2005: 26). They sought asylum in Europe
because of armed conflicts or when their residency status in the host Arab countries
became increasingly insecure. In most cases, they were denied the right to return
to these countries.
Thousands of middle-class stateless Palestinian families who lived in the Gulf
States and had the financial ability to travel headed after the invasion of Kuwait
124 Abbas Shiblak
to Canada and Australia and Europe, in search of a passport and citizenship. They
were virtually buying citizenship with the life savings to secure the future of their
stateless children. What was previously considered as a politically incorrect and
subversive act such as when Jordan in the 1950s ‘clothed’ the refugees with its
nationality, now became a vital document if not a life-line that stateless refugees are
willing to pay any price for. Only those fortunate Palestinian entrepreneurs with the
right connections are welcomed to join the club of ‘citizens’ in the host countries
through investment schemes offered by these countries such as Jordan, Canada and
Lebanon. The majority of those who emigrated beyond the Arab world try now to
come back mainly for work in the Gulf States. Having obtained a foreign passport
gives them a feeling of security and protection against expulsion or ill-treatment.
Unfortunately it is a protection that cannot be extended when they travel to their
occupied homeland where they are most in need for consulate protection of their
embassies (CPFPH 2008; Electronic Intifada 2008). Although Israel has no sover-
eignty on the occupied territories, it applies certain rules, against international law,
on PA inhabitants as if they were Israeli citizens. It refuses to recognise a foreign
passport that some Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza have acquired from
living abroad and does not allow them to use it on entry. It only treats them as a
PA passport or TD holder. The protection for Palestinians holding foreign pass-
ports ceases if they have Palestinian IDs. In some cases such protection ceases if
the holder of foreign passport is of Palestinian origin no matter whether he/she
has a Palestinian ID or not. Most of the Western consulates are either reluctant,
refuse to intervene or are unsuccessful when they try to assist Palestinians vis-
à-vis Israeli authorities. Since 2000, Israel has also been preventing Palestinians
from the PA areas from using the Tel Aviv Airport, the only civil airport in use in
Israel/Palestine after the Gaza airport was destroyed. Travelling to and from the PA
areas Palestinians have to embark on an agonising journey that takes them across
the Allenby (aka King Hussein Bridge) to Jordan or through Rafah from Gaza to
Egypt, which has been mostly closed since June 2007 when Hamas took control
of the Gaza Strip. Israel also denies entry to many Palestinians, holders of foreign
passports, who are not holders of Palestinian ID cards, from visiting or staying in
the territories. This is also the case with many foreigners working for international
agencies in the occupied territories. This is done under the most abused word in
Israeli political terminology, ‘security’ (Electronic Intifada 2008).
Indeed, the long-standing argument among used by Arab official circles that
granting full citizenship rights would harm their cause is no more valid or accept-
able. There is more awareness and recognition now by the refugees, human rights
advocates, as well as among Palestinian officials that the lack of citizenship rights
has a far-reaching human as well as political price that in fact causes further misery
to the refugees rather than serving their cause. This might explain the statement by
the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who for the first time by any Palestinian
official departed from the old familiar rhetoric and welcomed in an interview on
14 July 2005 the naturalisation of Palestinians ‘if any of the host Arab government
chose to do so’. An opinion poll that was carried out following the statement showed
that the majority of Palestinians agreed with him (PCPO 2005). The statement came
in response to a debate on whether the Palestinians should benefit from amend-
ments made on nationality laws in some Arab countries that allow naturalisation
under certain conditions of foreigners who contributed to their adopted countries
after long years of residency.
Citizenship and the search for a durable solution

In highlighting the fact that most Palestinian refugees are also stateless, Takkenberg
(1998: 195) rightly notes that being a refugee – stateless, dispossessed, not having
the passport of a state, not having even the theoretical option of returning to one’s
country, in other words not having the right to have rights – ‘has been at the very
heart of the Palestinian refugee problem’. He rightly argues that the element of
statelessness has been the most significant part of the refugee aspect in profoundly
affecting the lives and the wellbeing of the Palestinian people.
It has been pointed out that a sovereign Palestinian state would act as a cata-
lyst in resolving the refugee issue and in putting an end to statelessness among
Palestinians. However, it has to be taken into consideration that the refugee issue is
multifaceted and perhaps more than any other of the ‘final status’ issues has strong
regional dimensions. There should be no illusions, therefore, that the objective of
a durable solution could be achieved without a regional framework based on: (1) a
comprehensive peace settlement that includes all host Arab countries; (2) that this
should be in the context of full commitment to human rights and; (3) with options
being given to the Palestinian refugees themselves for repatriation inside Israel,
return to PA-controlled areas, compensation and full citizenship rights in the coun-
tries in which they choose to live. In fact, these rights are not contradictory and
do not cancel each other out, therefore they should be available to the refugees in
any future political settlement.
The American scholar Donna Arzt suggested in 1997 that a future peace settle-
ment should change the status of the refugees into ‘normal citizens’ in the countries
where they live. Arzt (1997) further argued that a ceiling should be imposed on the
number of refugees allowed back to their homes in Israel proper. This link between
settlement and limited return attracted strong criticism from the Palestinians not
because they do not agree to being ‘normal citizens’ in the states they live in but
because of the attempt to restrict the numbers of refugees allowed to return. Arzt’s
(1997) argument seems to have been based on the unrealistic assumption, often
repeated by Israeli officials, that refugees would return in large numbers. This
would, in their view, flood Israel and constitute a threat to the ‘Jewish’ character
of the state. It is an argument that is unrealistic and seems to have been designed
to create fear among Israeli public to deny the right of Palestinian refugee for
repatriation in principle.
What is important for the Palestinians is that Israel should acknowledge in prin-
ciple their right of return to their country. For the Palestinians, this is an individual
right that Israel can not take from them. For the majority of Palestinian refugees, the
return to their home is far deeper than actual physical return. It is about the narrative,
their history, their collective memory and identity. In reality, they are aware that
126 Abbas Shiblak
not many refugees will actually take up the option to return should it arise. In fact
there is enough evidence to suggest that fewer refugees would ultimately choose
to return to their original homes inside Israel than the numbers cited by both Israeli
and Palestinian sides. Population mobility is usually far more complex than simply
asserting the legal right of the refugees to be in an area identified as ‘homeland’.
Sari Hanafi (2008a: 32–56) and others have examined some of the sociological,
economic and cultural aspects that determine mobility in the Palestinians’ case
while making use of case studies of forced migration worldwide. Hanafi (2008a)
concluded that people usually make up their mind rationally and not emotionally
when it comes to deciding where to live. Factors they consider include matters
affecting their wellbeing, employment, housing, family, community social network,
freedom, security, equality and standing before the law.
The first publicised survey of its kind conducted among Palestinian refugees in
Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza by the Palestinian Centre for Policy
and Survey Research (2003) on ‘Preference and behaviour in a Palestinian–Israeli
permanent refugee agreement’, found that no more than 10 per cent of the respond-
ents were willing to move to and live in Israel (Shikaki 2003). It is difficult to assess
the accuracy of such findings at a time when no other options are actually available
to the refugees, but the survey is certainly an indicator that cannot be dismissed
simply on political grounds.
Presently, Palestinians can hardly think of a positive outcome of the peace agree-
ment with Israel or the DOP, also known as Oslo Accords of 1993. Yet, one of the
main DOP achievements is the official termination of the application of Israeli meas-
ures on Palestinian civil affairs. This includes the ‘emancipation’ of the Palestinian
passport. Though it is widely recognised by great number of states, it is unique in
the sense that it is the only document that has two contradictory titles both stamped
on it. It is a ‘passport’ as the Palestinian would like to call it and it is a ‘travel docu-
ment’ as the Israelis would like to describe it. What is clear, however, is that until a
fully fledged Palestinian state exists, neither passport nor the travel document would
be considered as legal proof of citizenship. Beside that, the reality on the ground is
that Israel still retains total control of movement across border crossings and has
reinstated most of the restrictions it applied before the peace agreement since the
year 2000. These include imposing security requirements for travel on those under
the age of 35, freezing of applications for family reunification since early 2000 and
only allowing a number of visitors, estimated to be 40,000, who exceeded their stay
in the PA areas to stay, and denying Palestinians holders of foreign passports entry
or extension of their visa. These measures brought more fragmentation, deprivation
and made a mockery of the Palestinian passport whereby Palestinians can travel to
almost any country in the world but not within their own country.
Conclusion
More than any thing, the statelessness aspect has shaped the experience of the
exiled Palestinian refugees. Statelessness exposed the Palestinian refugee to vari-
ous degrees of discriminatory practices in Arab host states. It has had a profound
effect on their mobility, welfare, livelihood and their ability to build better future
and to sustain themselves. Statelessness among the Palestinian refugees should be
acknowledged and dealt with by the international community, the regional host
countries and the concerned agencies of the UN.
The refugee issue stands at the heart of any political settlement to the Arab–Israeli
conflict. A fully fledged and viable Palestinian state would be a catalyst to resolve
the refugee issue. However, a Palestinian state would neither in itself put an end
to the saga of statelessness among Palestinian refugees nor resolve all the aspects
of the refugee issue.
One of the main elements in any durable solution to the refugee issue is the ques-
tion of citizenship or lack of it among Palestinians. A peace agreement should widen
the options for the refugees and address all aspects of the refugee issue including
the rights of repatriation to Israel, return to a Palestinian state, compensation and
equality and full citizenship rights in countries where refugees choose to remain
or to live in the future.
The regional aspect of the refugee issue therefore should not be overlooked.
All regional and international actors should be involved. Thus without a compre-
hensive peace agreement that includes all the Arab host governments within the
UNRWA areas of operation and beyond, a complete resolution of the refugee issue
will remain illusory.
Notes
1 The figures are given in an interview with the author in 20 April 2006, Cairo.
2 LAS Council of Ministers, Resolution no. 5093 in 1991.
3 Interview with Palestinian families and UNHCR officials (Cairo Office), 2–9 April 2006;
interview by Ambassador M. Subeih, Head of Palestinian permanent delegation to LAS
in Al-Sahrq Al-Awsat (Arabic daily), 2 August 2004; also by the Egyptian Minster of
Justice in Al-Quds Al-Arabi (Arabic daily), 29 June 2004, London; statement by the
Egyptian Ministry of Interior in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, 18 January 2005.
4 The Minister of Interior estimated that nationality had been withdrawn from round 4,000
naturalised persons, Al-Hayat (Arabic daily), 2/1/2004.
5 See statement by Deputy Interior Minister Naser Ben Hamad Al-Hanaya, in Al-Sharq
Al-Awsat, 21 October 2005.
6 Nabil, a Palestinian young man from Lebanon who sought asylum in the United
Kingdom, interview with the author, 8 February 2002.
7 Figures given by the Palestinian Ministry of Civil Affairs, 2003.
8 Dynamics of humanitarian
aid, local and regional politics
The Palestine refugees as a case-
study
Jalal Al Husseini and Riccardo Bocco
This chapter explores the Palestinian refugees’ legal status in the Near East: Jordan,
Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It will focus more particularly
on the ‘Palestine refugees’, namely those Palestinian refugees (and their descend-
ants) living in the above-mentioned countries/territories registered by the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestine Refugees in the Near East (see
Table 8.1).1 The 4.6 million Palestine refugees constitute about four-fifths of the
total number of Palestinian refugees living in the Near East and two-thirds of the
total number of Palestinian refugees around the world, estimated at about 7.5 mil-
lion (Badil 2006: 49). The Palestine refugees have lived under a variety of different
national jurisdictions. Formal citizens in Jordan since 1949, the majority of those
residing in the other host countries have remained stateless. On the socioeconomic
level, they have been subjected to various discriminatory systems, from quasi-parity
in Syria to sheer marginalization in Lebanon. Beyond these differences, two pat-
terns have nevertheless contributed to define them as one cohesive, transnational,
refugee category.
The first pattern is the prevalence of the ‘right of return’ in their collective
narratives (Farah 1997: 259–98). Predicated on resolution 194 (III) of the United
Nations General Assembly (UNGA),2 the ‘right of return’ has been instrumental
in shaping the refugees’ legal status as well as their daily relationships with host
societies (Aruri 2001). The notion of the ‘right of return’ has also conditioned the
development of the refugee camps’ physical and housing infrastructure. While the
legal relevance of such a claim is hardly questionable, it seems legitimate to inquire
about its salience for most refugees after 60 years of exile.
The second pattern is the existence of UNRWA, whose temporary mandate has
been regularly extended by the UNGA since 1949. UNRWA has gradually estab-
lished itself over the years as a ‘quasi-state’ institution taking on responsibilities
traditionally assigned to national governments in the field of education, health
care, relief and social welfare services and, since the early 1990s, micro-credit and
microfinance (Bocco 2009). How do the refugees perceive the Agency’s mandate,
six decades after its establishment? How does UNRWA’s humanitarian mandate fit
within the larger political and socioeconomic contexts of its operation fields?
Combining findings of recent surveys with information drawn from primary
and secondary sources, this chapter highlights the interplay of humanitarian,
Dynamics of humanitarian aid, local and regional politics 129
Table 8.1 UNRWA registered refugees (30 June 2009)
West Bank Gaza Strip Jordan Lebanon Syria Total
Registered 771,143 1,090,932 1,967,414 421,993 467,417 4,718,899

refugees (RRs)
Increase in RRs 2.2 3.0 1.9 1.3 2.3 2.2
over the previous
year (%)
RR as 16 23 42 9 10 100
percentage of
total RRs
Existing camps 19 8 10 12 9 58
RRs in camps 195,770 499,231 339,668 224,194 126,453 1,385,316
(RRCs)
RRCs as 25 46 17 53 27 29
percentage of
RRs
Source: UNRWA in Figures – Figures as of 30 June 2009, Public Information Office, UNRWA
Headquarters, September 2009.
socioeconomic and political considerations that have shaped the refugees’ status
in the Near East during two distinct phases of their history, namely before and after
the signing in Washington of the Declaration of Principles (generally known as
the ‘Oslo Accords’) between Israel and the PLO in September 1993. The Palestine
refugee experience offers a textbook example of how the relationships between
humanitarian agencies, donor and host authorities and refugees evolve in such
a way as to maintain, over decades, a status quo predicated on the hypothetical
advent of a regional peace. This chapter also sheds light on the potential lines of
fragmentation and cohesion that have appeared among Palestinians during the
‘Oslo process’ over such crucial issues as the very meaning of the ‘right of return’
and the role of UNRWA.
The evolution of the Palestine refugees’ status in the

Near East
It was during the 1950s that the Arab League formally established the legal and
political guidelines for the Palestine refugees’ integration in each of the Arab host
state. Despite numerous infringements, these guidelines are still regarded as the
standards to which the Arab states should adhere.
Statelessness as a means of preserving the ‘right of return’

Maintaining the refugees as stateless persons in order to retain their Palestinian
nationality and thus preserve their ‘right of return’ is the major principle that has
130 Jalal Al Husseini and Riccardo Bocco
guided the Arab League’s ‘Palestine refugee’ policies.3 Apart from a few exemp-
tions, all Near East Arab countries have adopted this principle, providing mere
travel documents to the refugees (Takkenberg 1998). Jordan has from the outset
departed from this general trend. As early as late 1949, it started conferring citizen-
ship to all Palestinians residing in the areas under its control on both banks of the
Jordan River. This included the Palestinian refugees and their descendants to whom
the authorities continued to vow to struggle for the liberation of their homeland.
In so doing, Jordan created ‘temporary refugee-citizens’, formally endowed with
citizenship rights and duties pending the day when they would be given the right
to choose to return to Palestine or to stay in Jordan. This naturalization policy4 has
enabled the refugees to participate in Jordan’s national politics and facilitated their
absorption in the local and regional job markets. Such a liberal attitude has neverthe-
less had, up to the emergence of the PLO in the 1960s, a political cost. For while
the refugees’ ‘right of return’ and entitlement to receive UNRWA’s assistance was
upheld in national and international forums, any notion of a separate ‘Palestinian
identity’ in Jordan’s internal politics was banned by royal decree.
The inhabitants of the official refugee camps jointly administered by UNRWA
and the host authorities have symbolized the refugees’ humanitarian plight as
well as their struggle against permanent resettlement for the sake of the ‘right of
return’. Camp refugees have long opposed any structural improvements in the
camps because that could be interpreted as a permanent resettlement. Moreover, the
necessity to maintain the temporary character of the camps resulted in UNRWA and
the host authorities imposing drastic limitations on the housing units’ growth. This,
combined with demographic growth, restrictions on camps’ extension, widespread
poverty and poor material and financial investment, has led to the deterioration
of the refugee camps’ physical and environmental conditions. Today, the camps
and their inhabitants epitomize the dilemma pertaining to the refugees’ terms of
integration in the host countries. In turn, this dilemma has spawned ambivalent rep-
resentations of the camp refugees, either in terms of the ‘last guardians of the right of
return’ or as major obstacles to the host countries’ socioeconomic development.
The ‘positive’ discriminatory regime established by the Arab League was com-
pensated by numerous resolutions aimed at ensuring that the Palestinian refugees
would be treated on par with the host countries’ citizens in such socioeconomic
fields – not covered by UNRWA – as employment, residency, mobility and higher
education. However, these recommendations, as synthesized by the Casablanca
Protocol of 1965 (UNHCR 2009), have never been fully implemented. The modal-
ities of the refugees’ integration in the Arab host countries have been predominantly
dictated by internal considerations. The refugees’ demographic weight5 and their
active political involvement, first in opposition factions (such as the Baath and
Communist parties or the Muslim Brotherhood) then in the PLO-led Palestinian
national movement, has just but reinforced the fear amongst the Arab host societ-
ies that their prolonged presence may remain a potential threat to their internal
stability (Sayigh 1997).
The socioeconomic discrimination imposed by each host country on the Palestine
refugees, most often in the name of the ‘right of return’, has varied over time. In
Lebanon, authorities have prevented the socioeconomic absorption of the Palestinian
refugees for fear that any major improvement in their living conditions ‘led to reset-
tling the Palestinian refugees and their eventual assimilation’ (Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri quoted in Bowker 2003: 75). Accordingly, the Lebanese authorities have since
the 1960s subjected them to the laws pertaining to foreigners in such matters as
employment, acquisition of property, taxation and social security. Suspended after
the conclusion of the ‘Cairo Accords’ in 1969, these discriminatory regulations have
been fully enforced upon the Palestinians since their abrogation in 1987 (Suleiman
2006). In contrast, Syria has undertaken legal steps placing Palestinians on a par
with its nationals in the economic and social fields. Such a liberal stance may also
be explained by the fact that the Palestinian refugees in Syria have never constituted
more than 3–4 per cent of the total population. In the West Bank and Gaza, refugees
have benefited from the same social and economic rights as the indigenous popu-
lation. In Jordan, observers have pointed out a number of informal discriminations
against ‘Jordanians of Palestinian origin’ in the fields of employment in the public
sector (especially the military and intelligence services) and of representation in
national institutions (Abu-Odeh 1999). The fate of the West Bankers, refugees
and non-refugees alike, offers a stark illustration of the Palestinian’s vulnerability.
Following King Hussein’s 1988 decision to sever all administrative and legal links
between the Hashemite Kingdom and the West Bank, in recognition of ‘the PLO’s
ambition to embody the Palestinian identity on Palestinian soil’ (King Hussein
1988), the West Bankers were stripped of their Jordanian citizenship, thus becom-
ing stateless ‘would-be citizens’ of a future Palestinian state. Since 1988, they have
been considered foreigners in Jordan, together with the ‘Gazan’ displaced persons
who were transferred to Jordan following the 1967 Arab–Israeli war (UNRWA
2009; Abed 2006: 17).6
UNRWA as an unintended guardian of the ‘right of return’

The second component of the ‘Arab refugee system’ has to do with the politicization
of UNRWA’s mandate. In the eyes of the Western powers, UNRWA’s humanitar-
ian assistance on behalf of the Palestine refugees was to be temporary and mainly
directed towards facilitating their socioeconomic integration in the host countries.
Relief aid was to be discontinued by the end of 1950 and gradually superseded by
a works’ programme to be terminated by mid-1951. The Arab host countries were
to bear the onus of monitoring the refugees’ socioeconomic conditions following
UNRWA dismantlement. However, during the discussions that preceded the adop-
tion of UNGA resolution 302 (IV) pertaining to the establishment of UNRWA, the
Arab host states managed to link directly the Agency’s mandate to the implementa-
tion of resolution 194 (III). Hence, while paragraph 5 of the resolution states that
the Agency’s activities ‘would not be prejudicial to the provisions of resolution
194 (III)’, its paragraph 20 directs UNRWA to ‘consult with the United Nations
Conciliation Commission for Palestine7 in the best interests of their respective
tasks, with particular reference to paragraph 11 of General Assembly resolution
194 (III)’.
The organic link thus established between UNRWA and resolution 194 (III) was
only but one of the factors that contributed to root UNRWA in the lives of the refu-
gee communities. UNRWA’s institutional characteristics have had a similar effect.
Unlike sister agencies, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), UNRWA has directly administered its humanitarian programmes thanks
to its ever-growing number of local employees,8 thereby acquiring the trappings of
a ‘quasi-governmental mission’ (Buehrig 1971). UNRWA’s prevalence amongst the
Palestinian communities also stems from the demise, or non-involvement, of other
organizations such as the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine
(UNCCP), created in December 1948. Although its mandate was never terminated,
it has become the symbol of the United Nations’ (UN) inability to resolve the
Arab–Israeli dispute. For its part, the UNHCR, which was created by the UNGA
about the same time as UNRWA, excluded from its protection mandate any refugee
‘receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection and assistance’.9 This is obvi-
ously the case of the UNRWA-serviced Palestine refugees, although the Agency’s
general assistance mandate has never included the protection activities covered
by the UNHCR.10
Consequently, UNRWA has been perceived by the refugees as a unique reflection
of the international community’s recognition of their ‘right to return’. Its registra-
tion card became a political symbol: the only official documentary evidence of
the refugee status and it is still widely held as a ‘Passport to Palestine’ or as a prop
likely to further compensation claims (Plascov 1981: 64–5). This explains why
nearly every UNRWA step has been scrutinized by the refugees through the prism
of its conformity with the ‘right of return’. It is on these grounds that most refugees
were reluctant to engage in the collective small- and large-scale reintegration works
programmes devised by the Agency in the 1950s; conversely, the refugees approved
of the individual reintegration policy pursued by UNRWA as from 1959/60. Based
on educational and vocational training programmes, it led to the professional rein-
sertion of a large number of them, whether as local UNRWA employees or as skilled
labour, in the Gulf countries in particular (Schiff 1995).
In contrast, UNRWA’s institutional foundations have remained weak. Its three- to
five-year mandates have prevented its staff from engaging in long-term planning.
And its budget, based on voluntary contributions from the members of the inter-
national community, has fallen short of keeping pace with its increasing financial
needs, three-quarters of which are devoted to the local staff salaries (UNRWA
1995: 9). Recurrent budget deficits have compelled UNRWA to adopt austerity
measures in the form of curtailment of traditional services or the lack of mainte-
nance of its educational and medical facilities. Despite these adverse measures, the
Agency’s services output are still renowned for their relative efficiency, notably
in the field of education. Furthermore, the Agency has continued to be held as a
stabilizing ‘peace servicing’ factor in the Near East in the eyes of the Western donor
countries and as a symbol of the preservation of the refugees’ rights (Forsythe
1971: 1–3).
Palestine refugees and the challenges of the ‘Oslo peace
process’
The Declaration of Principles of September 1993 significantly affected the trilat-
eral refugee–UNRWA–host country relationship. By setting a time frame of five
years for the settlement of all components of the Arab–Israeli conflict, including
the refugee issue, the ‘Oslo Accords’ brought up to date the handover agenda that
the UNRWA’s founding resolution of December 1949 had set at the heart of the
Agency’s operational mandate. Under the aegis of the UN Secretariat, UNRWA
devised in association with the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA), a
handover strategy aimed at fostering ‘UNRWA–PA’ cooperation during the interim
period. As UNRWA put it in early 1995, the PA was first to be targeted:
since the population of the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of refugee status,
is Palestinian and the interim self-government applies to the entire Palestinian
population living in the autonomous areas. In the case of the host countries
. . . it is clear that any handover will require either a political resolution of the
refugee issue or a resolution of the General Assembly.
(UNRWA 1995: 10–11)
In line with this ‘West Bank/Gaza first’ policy, in December 1993 the UNGA
asked UNRWA to contribute to the economic and social stability of the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT) (UNGA 1993). The Peace Implementation Program
(PIP) from 1993 to 2000 aimed at setting up a permanent socioeconomic infra-
structure in Gaza and the West Bank, mainly through the improvement of the
camps’ infrastructure and job creation schemes. Besides, UNRWA undertook inter-
nal measures in preparation for its phasing out. First, new teachers were hired
on short-term contracts and contract termination indemnities were estimated for
the entire UNRWA staff (UNRWA 1995: 33); second, in July 1996, the Agency’s
headquarters were moved from Vienna to Gaza (the PA’s stronghold) instead of
Beirut, its original location. On its part, the PA sought to dismantle the camps
through their integration within the neighbouring municipalities. In the eyes of
the Palestinian leadership, refugee camps had become no more than symbols of
poverty and socioeconomic dependency on international charity that hardly fit its
vision of a fully-fledged sovereign state meant to serve as a model for the Arab
world (Kodmani-Darwish 1997: 157).
Excluded from the bilateral format of the peace process talks, the Arab host coun-
tries found themselves at the mercy of decisions taken separately by Israelis and
Palestinians. The prospect of being compelled to resettle the Palestinian refugees
led some Arab host countries to further strengthen their internal discriminatory
regime towards the refugees. Resorting to various excuses – from the necessity of
preserving the ‘right of return’ to the importance of implementing the Taef peace
agreements of 1989 – the Lebanese government has kept enforcing legal restrictions
against the Palestinian refugees, in relation to employment, access to public univer-
sities and inheritance rights (Suleiman 2006; Meier, 2008). Pushing the refugees
to emigrate permanently became a cornerstone of Lebanon’s policy vis-à-vis the
Palestinians (Mattar 2000: 261). Such a policy seems to have been rather success-
ful: while the number of Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA in Lebanon
amounted to about 392,000 people in 2003, the actual number actually residing
in the country was estimated by other sources at less than 200,000 (Ugland 2003:
17). Jordan’s initial strategy differed, as its leadership had bet since the early 1990s
on a forthcoming peace in the Near East. In October 1994 King Hussein signed a
peace treaty with Israel that explicitly alluded to the permanent settlement of the
refugees in Jordan. Article 8 of the ‘Wadi Araba Treaty’ on refugees and displaced
persons underscored the ‘massive human problems caused to both Parties by the
conflict in the Middle East’ and the ‘need to further alleviate those problems at a
bilateral level or multilateral level’ (paragraph 1). This included ‘agreed United
Nations programmes and other agreed international economic programmes con-
cerning refugees and displaced persons, including assistance for their settlement’
(paragraph 2).
In the following years, the hopes nurtured by the Palestinian and Jordanian leader-
ships in the peace process were crushed by the deterioration of the Israeli–Palestinian
relations. What is more, both of them saw their ‘pro-peace’ stance meet with fierce
internal opposition. In the West Bank and Gaza, the refugees coalesced as early
as 1993 around the ‘Union of the Refugee Youth Activities Centers’ and launched
campaigns aimed at putting centre-stage the ‘right of return’ on the Palestinian
national agenda; they also warned against the dissolution of both UNRWA and of
the camps it serviced before the achievement of a just peace agreement. By 1996–7,
the once-envisaged early dissolution of the camps and the transfer of UNRWA’s
activities to the PA had become taboo issues. The informal Israeli–Palestinian
peace initiatives that have taken place since 2000 have institutionalized a gradual
approach to UNRWA’s handover process whereby the Agency should be phased
out in accordance with an agreed timetable of five years as a targeted period. In
Jordan, opposition to the ‘Wadi Araba’ process came from refugee groups and
opposition parties as well as nationalist ‘Transjordanian’ pressure groups that started
questioning the refugees’ double-identity as Jordanians of Palestinian origin , thus
reviving the dreaded scenario of ‘the alternative Palestine state in Jordan’ (Abu-
Odeh 1999: 235–48). Under the pressure, in the late 1990s Jordan joined Syria,
Lebanon and the Arab League in condemning any plan aimed at giving away the
refugees’ political rights, despite the promises of compensation made to them by
the Western sponsors of the peace process.
The one conclusive legacy of the ‘Oslo peace process’ remains the refugees’ and
host authorities’ new positive attitude towards the camps’ management. The notion
of a sustainable improvement of camps’ physical infrastructure had become one of
the refugees’ main claims. Collective socioeconomic rehabilitation programmes
were to be clearly differentiated from resettlement schemes aimed at burying the
‘right of return’. In this spirit, the refugees welcomed UNRWA’s PIP projects, even
though these were balanced by a net reduction of the Agency’s general budget.
The PLO Department of Refugee Affairs bolstered this developmental trend in
1996–7 by establishing in each camp of the West Bank and Gaza Strip ‘Services
Committees’ whose mandate to date is to implement, in coordination with UNRWA,
developmental projects in the camps.
Since the early 2000s, Jordan, Syria and even Lebanon have followed suit in
modifying, to various extents, their overall approach to camp development. This
shift may be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the camps’ harsh realities with
their drive for long-term socioeconomic modernization and with political stability.
The Jordanian authorities, who since the mid-1970s had taken over UNRWA’s role
as caretakers of the camps’ physical infrastructure, have been the most pro-active in
this field. Since 2000, they have regularly integrated the refugee camps in some of
the country’s development policies.11 The Syrian authorities have assisted UNRWA in
the implementation of large-scale water/wastewater and housing rehabilitation in sev-
eral camps of the country.12 Finally, since 2005, Lebanon has been more favourable
to camp rehabilitation projects, including in the PLO-controlled camps of southern
Lebanon where access to construction material had previously been restricted.
Similarly, the reconstruction of those areas of the Jenin camp in the West Bank
that were demolished by the Israeli army in April 2002 and that of the Nahr el-Bared
camp in Lebanon – literally razed in the course of the clashes that opposed the
fundamentalist Fatah al-Islam faction and the Lebanese army in 2007 – were both
conducted in such a way as to endow them with suitable housing and community
spaces (UNRWA 2010b).13 One of the most remarkable aspects of all these recent
camp projects is that they have involved the refugees in their various stages: from
the design of the rebuilt areas to their maintenance following UNRWA’s intervention
(Wilkinson 2003: 43–6).
This shift in the refugees’ and host countries’ attitude towards camp development
has been accompanied by dramatic changes in the way the Palestinian leadership
conceives of the ‘right of return’. It has actually favoured a pragmatic solution
chiefly based on the repatriation of the 1948 refugees and the 1967 displaced persons
to the territories of the future Palestinian state, namely the West Bank and Gaza,
and on a compensated resettlement outside Palestine.14 Similarly, the current Arab
negotiation platform elaborated by the Arab Summit in Beirut in 2002 calls for the
‘achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon
in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 194’ within the framework
of a two-state solution, but without specifying the modalities of implementation
of that resolution.15 In parallel, host countries have taken integrative steps towards
the Palestinian refugees as a whole. For instance, the Jordanian authorities have
sought to strengthen their ‘Jordanian’ identity by trying to co-opt them within the
several nation-wide campaigns they have launched since the early 2000s in order
to unify the various segments of the country’s population.16 And even the Lebanese
authorities, who had so far been reluctant to engage the Palestine refugees on
internal issues, established a Lebanese–Palestinian Dialogue Committee (LPDC) in
October 2005, whose aims are to tackle inter alia the outstanding socioeconomic,
legal and security issues related to the Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon,
in collaboration with UNRWA (LPDC 2009).
Host countries, however, have been careful to predicate their camp interventions
on purely humanitarian grounds and not as policies for refugees’ assimilation. In
March 2005 the Arab countries flatly rejected Palestinian President Abu Mazen’s
suggestion that host countries confer citizenship on the Palestinian refugees residing
on their soil pending the achievement of a permanent status agreement (Mazen
2005). The failure of the peace process, together with Israel’s intransigence regard-
ing the issue of the ‘right of return’, have left the Arab countries with little room for
manoeuvring. Moreover, their concerns over the gradual dismantling of UNRWA,
as well as over the internal socioeconomic and political challenges likely to be
brought up by any revision of the legal system ruling the Palestinian refugees, have
not been alleviated. As things stand, the preservation of a manageable sub-optimal
status quo is therefore considered preferable to the uncertainties related to any in-
depth overhaul of the refugee status. To some extent, this also holds true for the PA:
although the refugees were allowed to participate in the 1997 and 2006 legislative
elections and therefore are represented in the PA’s legislative council, West Bank
camps have remained separate administrative entities and did therefore not get
involved in the 2005 municipal elections (Signoles 2001: 318–22).
But what do the refugees think of their present situation? So far, refugees’ col-
lective voices have mainly been conveyed, and interpreted, through institutional
stakeholders. The core issue has revolved around the commitment to the ‘right of
return’, underscoring lines of fragmentation. Some, mostly refugee activists, have
insisted on the ‘sacrosanct’ character of that right, conceding at most that it would
be up to the refugees themselves to decide whether they wish to implement it or
rather receive compensations. Other stakeholders, including PLO officials, have
claimed that only a small portion of the refugees would decide to return to their
homes if they were given the opportunity to do so (Khalaf 1990: 92–112).17 From
this, a host of other significant issues arise: in the absence of breakthrough in the
peace process, how do refugees regard their status in both the humanitarian and
political dimensions? What significance do they attach to their registration with
UNRWA? How do they assess their status within their host societies? What are the
main problems they face as refugees?
UNRWA: a basic services provider or a proof of ‘refugee identity’?

This section tackles the Palestine refugees’ opinions about their ‘refugee status’.
It is mainly based on the findings of a quantitative survey (the Near East Project
(NEP) survey) conducted with Palestine refugees in the Agency’s five fields of
operations (or ‘host countries’) in August–September 2005 by the Graduate Institute
of Development Studies (IUED-Geneva University) and the University of Louvain-
la-Neuve (Belgium) in coordination with UNRWA.18 In addition to the traditional
socioeconomic topics covered by living conditions surveys (including poverty, edu-
cation, health and housing status), the questionnaire included two general questions
referring to the issue at stake. The first question pertains to the refugees’ perceptions
of UNRWA in terms of the benefits accruing from it. The second question explores
the refugees’ views about their status in terms of problems they faced as refugees.
Is being registered with UNRWA more a means of getting access to its basic
services; does it rather constitute a proof of refugee status likely to promote a
‘refugee identity’ in exile and/or to be used as a legal prop for future claims to
repatriation and compensation; or, alternatively, has it become, 60 years after its
establishment, a meaningless institution?19 The NEP survey first indicates that
UNRWA has remained a ‘meaningful’ institution in the eyes of a large majority of
refugees across the Agency’s fields of operations.20 As shown by Table 8.2, only a
small minority of refugees think otherwise, in the West Bank and Lebanon in par-
ticular. These may include registered refugees who do not use UNRWA services,21
or refugees dissatisfied with them, respectively.22 They may also comprise refugees
disillusioned with the peace process and therefore unconvinced that recognition of
their refugee status is likely to lead to a partial or full recovery of their rights, either
through repatriation and/or compensation. Table 8.2 also shows that in all fields of
operations except Gaza, the bulk of refugees (up to three-quarters of them in Jordan)
see proof of refugee status as the main advantage of registration with UNRWA.
These findings confirm coexisting patterns related to the UNRWA–refugee rela-
tionship: first, the importance of the political, instrumental significance the refugees
still attach to being registered with the Agency. Second, the declining quality of
UNRWA’s services due to budget restrictions may have jeopardized their salience
in the eyes of the refugees (UNRWA 2005a: 7–9). Gaza’s specificity in that regard
may stem from its unique socioeconomic and humanitarian contexts. The only field
predominantly inhabited by Palestinian refugees (over two-thirds of the total Gaza
population) (PCBS 2009), it has traditionally been, just behind Lebanon, UNRWA’s
most financially endowed area of operation in respect of its regular educational,
healthcare and relief and social services: $153 per capita per two-year period, as
compared to $117 in the West Bank, $100 in Syria and just $61 in Jordan (UNRWA
2008).23 UNRWA’s operational significance in Gaza has further been reinforced
since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000. Since its refugees have been the
main beneficiaries of the emergency programmes in the OPT (IUED 2001–8).24
Such a commitment has been most welcomed by the Gaza population at large. A
poll carried out in Gaza by the Norwegian research institute FAFO in September
2005 indicated that over three-quarters of the population expressed confidence in
UNRWA, as opposed to one-quarter who mainly trusted the PA institutions (Fafo
2005, 2009).25
In order to better grasp the refugees’ relationship with UNRWA, we cross-
tabulated these overall findings with an independent variable: the ‘area of residence’
variable relating to the location of the interviewed refugees, either inside or outside
Table 8.2 Main advantage of registration with UNRWA (in per cent)
Gaza West Bank Syria Lebanon Jordan
Proof of refugee status 49 58 67 62 76
Access to UNRWA services 48 26 23 27 18
None 3 15 9 10 6
Other 0 1 1 1 0
Source: NEP project, 2005.

a camp. It was initially assumed that more camp refugees would emphasize the
importance of UNRWA as a basic services’ provider. While the Agency is expected
to provide such services to all registered refugees, whatever their area of residence,
camps are usually the only locations to host the full gamut of the Agency’s schools,
clinics, relief distribution and social centres. Moreover, as the NEP poll has shown,
camp refugees are on average poorer than non-camp refugees,26 and they also tend
to use UNRWA services in higher numbers.27 Table 8.3 shows that our assumption
holds true in the West Bank, Jordan and Syria. Conversely, in Lebanon and Gaza,
namely the host countries with the highest percentages of camp refugees (53 per
cent and 46 per cent, respectively, see Table 8.1), refugees living outside camps
attached more importance to UNRWA’s services than the camp dwellers. In Gaza
outside the camps, access to such services was even considered by refugees as more
important than securing refugee status.
The data from Lebanon and Gaza reflect the unique importance ascribed by
refugees to UNRWA as a basic services’ provider in these host territories, whatever
the quality. In Lebanon, where camps gather most if not all of UNRWA facilities,
restrictions on access to governmental services and the high costs imposed by
private institutions render the Agency’s services comparatively more valuable for
non-camp refugees. In Gaza, the non-camp refugees’ emphasis on UNRWA’s serv-
ices reflects the similar degree of poverty inside and outside camps, and attests as
well to the Agency’s overall popularity in this field of operation.28
The ‘cost of refugee-ness’

Beside registration with UNRWA, two additional factors have contributed to shape
the refugees’ lives in the Arab host countries: their legal status as ‘stateless’ people
– except in Jordan – and their submission to more or less discriminatory socio-
economic regimes. What perception do the Palestine refugees have of their current
situation? The NEP survey has endeavoured to tackle this question by asking the
refugee respondents to identify the three main problems they usually face due to
their specific status. During the data processing phase of the survey, the respondent’s
answers were categorized into eight significant ‘problem categories’. Most of these
categories pertain to problems directly linked to the terms of their integration in
the host country: ‘economic problems’ (or ‘poverty’); ‘unemployment’; ‘mobility’
(internally, or opportunity to migrate, or forced displacement); ‘substandard housing
and environment’; ‘insufficient aid and substandard services’; and ‘discrimination’
(in general or specifically related to ‘employment’, ‘political’ and ‘social’ types of
discrimination). One category related to the refugees’ symbolic attachment to their
place of origin: ‘loss of homeland/longing for return’.
The following paragraphs will focus only on the most significant problem men-
tioned by the refugees. The findings of the survey (Table 8.4) indicate that, except
for Syria, discrimination stands out as the first main problem faced by the refu-
gees, affecting around one-fifth and up to nearly one-third of them across the host
countries. This is also true in Jordan, despite the comparatively more favourable
legal status conferred on most refugees as citizens. This rather surprising finding
Table 8.3 Main advantage of registration with UNRWA per place or residence (in per cent)
Gaza non- Gaza West Bank West Bank Syria Syria Lebanon Lebanon Jordan Jordan
camp camp non-camp camp non-camp camp non-camp camp non-camp camp
Proof of refugee status 47 53 59 57 75 55 56 68 78 68

Access to UNRWA 51 43 24 31 16 33 29 25 16 26
services
None 2 4 16 11 8 11 14 6 6 6
Other 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0

sheds light on the informal discrimination these refugees have been subjected to
in past years, especially in the field of recruitment in the Jordanian public sector.
Being for the most part fully fledged citizens, refugees in Jordan may have higher
expectations in this regard.
Further in-depth analysis on the ‘discrimination’ variable reveals that where
Palestine refugees formally benefit from the same legal status as the host popula-
tion, namely Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, discrimination is mostly defined in
‘general/social discrimination’ terms. Conversely, political discrimination is seen
as the main problem where refugees are stateless and can therefore not participate
officially in the country’s national politics, namely in Syria and Lebanon. Whether
these refugees would accept to be involved in national politics through the partial
or full regularization of their situation in the host country remains an open ques-
tion. However, the above-mentioned rejection of President Abu Mazen’s 2005
initiative indicates that this option is not in the offing. Be that as it may, referring
to ‘discrimination’ as a problem –whereas it is still often held by the host author-
ities as a ‘positive’ step meant to preserve the refugees’ ‘right of return’ – confirms
the refugees’ questioning of the legal status system set up for them by the Arab
countries in the 1950s.
Socioeconomic problems either in the form of (un)employment or poverty also
rank high amongst the refugees’ main problems, except in Syria. In Lebanon, the
restrictive job regulations they are subjected to, combined with their status as state-
less persons, render refugees particularly vulnerable.29 In the OPT, more contextual
patterns prevail. In Gaza, the refugees’ focus on unemployment betrays the very high
level of refugees declaring themselves unemployed when the survey was undertaken
(40 per cent versus 26 per cent in the West Bank), which is mainly due to sheer lack
of access to jobs in the Strip itself or in Israel. In general, the NEP survey attests
to the adverse effects of the al-Aqsa Intifada on the refugees’ general living condi-
tions, expressed either in terms of unemployment in Gaza or of poverty in the West
Bank. In the same vein, the serious degradation of the housing and environment
conditions in the OPT since 2000 was highlighted by the comparatively higher
numbers of refugees of these territories that referred to ‘substandard housing and
environment’ as their primary problem, in the camps more especially.30
Problems related to access to aid and access to basic services were perceived as
relatively secondary when compared to the more fundamental problems of discrim-
ination, employment and poverty. They nevertheless constitute a salient ‘problem
category’ amongst refugees residing in Jordan and in the West Bank, namely those
fields where the refugees expressed the least interest in the operational aspect of
UNRWA’s services (less than one-fifth of the respondents in Jordan), or in regis-
tration with UNRWA as a whole (up to 15 per cent of the respondents in the West
Bank) (see Table 8.2). In any event, such findings indicate that little considera-
tion for UNRWA and its services does not necessarily entail outright disregard
for them.
Finally, while references to problems related to longing for return are present in
all fields, they only rank high in Syria. Understandably, nearly 60 years after the
exodus, such feelings are less prevalent than day-to-day problems.31 However, this
should not be interpreted as to minimize the refugees’ attachment to their ‘right of
return’. Its full recognition as a principle of international law by Israel and the inter-
national community has remained one of the refugees’ main demands since 1948.
It also stands out as one of the PLO’s main demands within the framework of the
permanent status talks with Israel, regardless of the modalities of its implementa-
tion. The symbolic interpretation of UNRWA’s registration made by a majority of
refugees as a proof of their status also testifies to the preserved significance of the
vested rights attached to it.
Table 8.4 also highlights the specificity of the Palestine refugees’ situation in
Syria. Reflecting the relatively liberal socioeconomic regime tailored for them
by the Syrian authorities, less emphasis was set on problems that are pervasive
elsewhere, such as employment, discrimination and insufficient basic services.
Conversely, they come out as comparatively much more prone to mobility prob-
lems. Confirming this figure, migration-related data from the NEP survey indicate
that only one out of ten respondents in Syria had not migrated either internally
or outside the country, compared to about one-third of them in Jordan and in the
West Bank and about half of them in Lebanon and in Gaza. The high proportion of
refugees referring to mobility problems in Syria may have different causes. It might
precisely result from the refugees’ relatively little concern for the other problems
– discrimination in particular – usually referred to in the other host countries. It
might also result from several factors specific to the mobility situation in Syria.
With regard to external labour migration for instance, refugees in Syria may have
been considered on average less ‘competitive’ on the regional labour market given
their comparatively lower educational attainments and language skills.32 In addi-
tion, the departure of the Syrian troops from Lebanon in April 2005 deprived many
non-qualified refugees from Syria (as well as Syrian nationals) of an external job
outlet. Explaining the low levels of internal migration in Syria, when compared to
Table 8.4 Refugees’ main problems per host country (in per cent)
Jordan Lebanon Syria West Bank Gaza
Economic (poverty) 12 5 7 22 17
Employment 19 33 5 5 26
Housing and environment 6 2 2 15 16
Discrimination 26 30 6 27 17
Aid and services 14 8 4 16 7
Loss of homeland/longing 12 6 24 9 6
for return
Mobility (West Bank 1 4 40 3 4
forced displacement)
Other 10 11 12 3 7

regional levels, a Fafo report put forward such factors as the guaranteed ownership
of the dwelling, near parity in social services and little variations in wage levels,
offering few incentives to migrate; and expensive housing costs in large cities
(Khawaja 2002: 21).
Conclusion
The refugees’ status in the Near East has been shaped to a large extent by the legal
‘refugee system’ set up by the Arab states in the wake of the 1948 exodus around
two priorities: the preservation of the refugees’ ‘right of return’ and the handling
of the refugees’ social and economic needs in accordance with the host societies’
internal interests. This explains why, behind the common Arab discourse in favour
of the refugees’ ‘right of return’ through the implementation of resolution 194 (III),
there remain large disparities in the refugees’ legal, political and socioeconomic
status and realities across the Near East.
In spite of the many turbulent events that have marked the relations between
the Palestinian refugee communities and their host countries since 1948, the ‘Arab
refugee system’ is still in place. Resolution 194 (III), the cornerstone of the refugees’
claims, is still endorsed by a large majority of the UNGA’s member states. Moreover,
despite chronic budget shortages, UNRWA is still fully operative in its five fields of
operations vis-à-vis the refugees. In this respect, the 2005 NEP survey highlighted
the prevalence of the political value the refugee ascribe to their registration with the
Agency, namely as a proof of their refugee status rather than as a source of basic
services (except in Gaza). This may be a matter of concern for UNRWA. The fact
that only a minority of refugees (roughly one-third of them) perceives access to its
services as an advantage accruing from registration also reflects dissatisfaction with
the state of UNRWA’s services. Also questioned by the refugees is the discrimin-
atory system set up by the Arab host countries to preserve their ‘right of return’.
Improving the modalities of their integration in these countries, especially in the
economic and social fields, is no more seen by the refugees, inside and outside
camps, as a threat to their political rights; quite the opposite.
These findings may be policy relevant for the way any permanent status agree-
ment can be perceived and implemented by the refugees and the host countries. The
first issue concerns the notion of resettlement. Given Israel’s refusal to consider
any return of the refugees in accordance with the provisions of resolution 194 (III),
resettlement has been repeatedly presented by Israeli and Western stakeholders as
the ‘magic solution’ likely to solve quickly and permanently the Palestinian refugee
problem. Our survey’s findings allude to the fact that, should the resettlement option
prevail, its implementation in a post-peace agreement context would necessarily
entail, in each of the host countries, potentially destabilizing reappraisals of the
refugees’ formal and informal statuses at all local and national levels. The uncer-
tainties surrounding the modalities of resettlement are compounded by the fact that,
despite the laudable efforts displayed by the informal settlement proposals that have
flourished since the late 1990s, the issue of compensation for refugees (in exchange
for their ‘return’ to their original homes) has not yet been clearly defined, either
with regard to the amount of the compensation sums involved or to the modalities
of payment.33 Furthermore, neither the host countries (who were excluded from the
bilateral, Israeli–Palestinian, format of the permanent status talks) nor the refugee
communities have been directly consulted on such crucial matters.
More worrying, from a refugee perspective, is the emergence among international,
Arab and even some Palestinian stakeholders of a new ‘pragmatic’ interpretation of
the notion of ‘return’ that encapsulates it within a two-state solution. According to
this interpretation, the bulk of the refugees in the diaspora would be granted a ‘right
of return’ limited to the future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, rather
than to their original homes now located in Israel. This approach was never form-
ally endorsed either by the Arab countries or by the PLO, mainly because Israel has
never initiated the necessary reciprocal conciliatory steps. It also fails to consider
the current lack of absorption capacity of the OPT and to address the demands for
return of those refugees already residing in the West Bank and in Gaza.
The unconditional recognition of the refugees’ ‘right of return’ to Palestine there-
fore remains at the core of the refugees’ self-perceptions and political claims. Their
response to any peace plan that would sell out their ‘right of return’ to the original
homes, villages and towns in exchange for the establishment of an independent
Palestinian state might very well trigger violent responses, especially in the absence
of coherent and rewarding compensation, alternative repatriation or resettlement
schemes.
Notes
1 UNRWA’s current Consolidated Eligibility and Registration Instructions define Palestine
refugees as being persons ‘whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the
period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood
as a result of the 1948 conflict. Palestine Refugees, and descendants of Palestine refugee
males, including legally adopted children, are eligible to register for UNRWA services’,
see UNRWA (2006a).
2 Paragraph 11 of this resolution (December 1948) resolves that: ‘the refugees wishing to
return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do
so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the prop-
erty of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under
principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments
or authorities responsible’.
3 Resolution 231 of 17 March 1949 adopted by the Arab League Council states ‘that the
lasting and just solution of the problem of the refugees would be their repatriation and
the safeguarding of all their rights to their properties, lives and liberty, and that these
should be guaranteed by the United Nations’. Unlike Resolution 194 (III), repatriation
is not predicated on a peace agreement between the Arab States and Israel.
4 By conferring citizenship to the Palestinians living on Jordanian territory (refugees and
indigenous West Bankers), King Abdullah I intended to benefit from the Palestinian
population involvement in the Jordanian state-building, see Mishal (1978).
5 The Palestine registered refugees in Jordan constitute over one-third of the total host
country population, while they averaged 10–11 per cent in Lebanon (see UNRWA 1992).
The sensitivity of the Palestinian demography in the two host countries is related to
different reasons. The Hashemite Kingdom fears that it could become an alternative
Palestinian state in the future. In Lebanon, the naturalization of Palestinian refugees
(mostly Sunni Muslims) has been perceived as a menace for the political system, because
potentially altering the balance of confessional communities’ representation.
6 The number of such displaced ‘Gazans’ today reaches about 200,000 people; 125,000
of them are registered with UNRWA in Jordan. Displaced ‘Gazans’ are given two-
year temporary ‘travel documents’ while the ‘West Bankers’ are given five-year ‘travel
documents’ (UNRWA 2010a).
7 The UNCCP, which has been a ‘dormant’ body since the 1960s, is the political body
created by resolution 194 (III), paragraph 2 (11 December 1948) to bring about a
comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Arab countries.
8 The number of local staff has grown from about 6,000 to more than 30,000 employees
between 1950 and 2010.
9 See Article I.D of the Convention and article c) of the UNHCR Statute. The Palestine ref-
ugees were also excluded from the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees,
which provides a universal definition of the term ‘refugee’.
10 Despite numerous pressures from the PLO, UNRWA has repeatedly refused to endorse
physical protection activities as a formalized component of its activities. For an updated
juridical debate on the UNRWA’s protection mandate, see the contributions of Goddard
et al. (2009).
11 For instance, the Social Productivity Program that aimed inter alia at upgrading the
poor areas’ infrastructural networks has also covered the camps. See http://www.espp.
gov.jo/about%20espp.htm (accessed 25 April 2009).
12 For infrastructural projects in Damascus camps, see http://www.un.org.sy/forms/pages/
viewPage.php?id=48 (accessed 25 April 2009). Syria’s flagship programme is the
‘Neirab’ camp rehabilitation project near Aleppo, where the infrastructural and hous-
ing works in this camp are preceded by a re-housing of part of its inhabitants in another
area, the informal Ein al-Tall camp (see Byrne 2005: 44–51).
13 See UNRWA’s website on the Nahr el-Bared camp’s reconstruction (UNRWA 2010b).
14 The ‘Taba Accords’ (2001) and the ‘Geneva Initiative’ (2003) provide for the return
of a small amount of refugees to Israel under a family reunification scheme, not as an
implementation of a ‘right of return’; see Keller (2004).
15 Similarly, PLO’s official statements since 1988 have confirmed the necessity of resolving
the refugee issue according to the relevant UN resolutions, while ‘the right of return’
has continued to be regularly spelled out in the Arab leaders’ discourses.
16 For example, one of the main goals of the ‘Jordan First’ initiative was to ‘deepen the
sense of national identity among citizens’, see Daily Star (2003).
17 In the same vein, a 2003 survey carried out among refugee communities in the OPT,
Jordan and Lebanon has found that although almost all refugees demanded the recog-
nition of the ‘right of return’, only 10%, on average, were actually looking forward to
implementing it outrightly (PCPSR 2003).
18 This survey covered a randomly drawn sample of about 2,000 respondents per field of
operation aged 16 and above selected from UNRWA’s list of refugees and residing in
UNRWA’s fields of operation. This sample was stratified according to gender and age,
and allowed for analysis at national/governorate level. It provided a confidence inter-
val of some +/–1 per cent for the five fields and a confidence interval of 2.2 per cent in
each of them. The survey is an outcome of a conference organized by UNRWA and the
Swiss government entitled ‘Meeting the Humanitarian Needs of Palestinian Refugees
in the Near East’, held in Geneva in June 2004. The detailed findings are available on
the UNRWA intranet. Only a synthesis report is publicly available, see Bocco et al.
(2007).
19 Question 66 of the survey is a multiple choice question that was formulated after numer-
ous talks with host-country representatives and UNRWA staff. It reads: ‘What is in your
own case the main advantage of being registered with UNRWA? (multiple answers):
Access to UNRWA services/Proof of refugee status/Other [specify]/None /Don’t know/
no answer.
20 Cross-tabulations used for the sake of analysis passed the statistical significance tests.
Findings have been contextualized and interpreted in the light of other NEP survey’s
findings, as well as other surveys.
21 In the field of primary education for instance, less than 44 per cent of Palestine refu-
gee children in the West Bank (and in Jordan) attended the Agency’s primary schools,
compared to over three-quarters in the other fields of operations (Al Husseini et al.
2007: 37).
22 A majority of refugees in Lebanon (60 per cent) said they were dissatisfied with the
Agency’s education services. Refugees living in the other fields of operations were
more positive about these services, from half of the refugees satisfied in Jordan to about
three-quarters of them in the West Bank and Gaza (Al Husseini et al. 2007: 47).
23 For regular programmes UNRWA’s Lebanon field has the largest capita budget, reaching
$168 per capita; see UNRWA (2008).
24 For a documented overview of the evolution of the living conditions in the OPT since
the outbreak of the Second Intifada see IUED (2001–8).
25 See Fafo (2005). More recently, a poll conducted in March 2009 following the January
2009 Israeli attacks against Hamas in Gaza confirmed this trend: nearly 70 per cent
of Gazans gave a positive opinion about UNRWA as opposed to less than 50 per cent
for the various Palestinian institutions See: http: http://www.fafo.no/ais/middeast/opt/
opinionpolls/poll2009.html (accessed 28 May 2010).
26 The NEP survey shows that as many as 57 per cent of the camp refugees in Jordan belong
to the lowest or the lower-mid income quintile as opposed to 35 per cent of non-camp
dwellers. The results are respectively 49 per cent and 35 per cent in Syria and 47 per
cent and 33 per cent in Lebanon. In the West Bank and Gaza, conversely, the rate of
poor or very poor respondents is not higher inside than outside camps (Lapeyre and
Bensaid 2006: 31).
27 For instance, the vast majority of camp refugee children attended UNRWA primary
schools: from around 85–8 per cent in Jordan and the West Bank, to around 95 per cent
in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria (Al Husseini et al. 2007: 38).
28 In and outside camps, refugees with low/very low incomes are comparatively more
numerous to consider UNRWA a source of basic services. However, this trend is not
linear, which may reflect the fact that, since 1992, eligibility for the Agency’s primary
education and health care is no longer based on the criteria of income and need but on
refugee status (UNRWA 1992: paragraph 35). In Lebanon, no clear pattern is singled out.
This may be ascribed to the rigid discriminatory legal status imposed by the authorities
upon the refugee population that has resulted in a relatively homogeneous dependence
on UNRWA.
29 This said, unemployment amongst refugees is not higher than amongst the host popu-
lation: 13 per cent of refugees (NEP 2005) versus 11.5 per cent of nationals in Lebanon
(Lebanese sources 2001); and 14 per cent of refugees (NEP 2005) versus 13.2 per cent
nationals in Jordan (Jordanian sources 2006). Rather than unemployment, the assump-
tion here would be that low labour participation rates are the refugees’ actual problem
outside Palestine. The activity rates of Palestine refugees (men and women) are lower
than that of the population of the host countries (Bensaid and Lapeyre 2006: 17–18).
30 Namely 44 per cent of camp refugees compared to 17 per cent of non-camp refugees in
the West Bank; and 38 per cent of camp refugees compared to 23 per cent of non-camp
refugees in Gaza (Rueff and Viaro 2007).
31 Data analysis on this variable shows that it is amongst the refugees older than 60 years
of age, namely those who may have lived in ‘pre-1948 Palestine’ or in times when the
possibility of recovering Palestine was less remote than today, that homesickness/long-
ing for return is the most cited (54 per cent of the 60+ age group in Syria for instance).
Another category concerned is the younger 16–20 years old group (41 per cent of the
16–20 age group in Syria). This may reflect a feeling of frustration at still being refugees
subjected to the stigmata of exile at a time when the prospect of recovering the original
homes (or to be compensated) either by force or through negotiations with Israel, seems
to have vanished.
32 The NEP survey indicates that over half of the (16 of age and above) Palestine refugee
population in Syria (51 per cent) dropped out of school before completing the basic
school cycle, as compared to 38 per cent in the West Bank, 35 per cent in Jordan and
29 per cent in Gaza. Only refugees in Lebanon claim a higher percentage of ‘basic
education dropouts’: 54 per cent. Yet, refugees in Lebanon (as well in Jordan, Gaza and
the West Bank) claim relatively higher levels of proficiency in languages (including
Arabic and English) (Al Husseini et al. 2007: 19–31).
33 The ‘Clinton parameters’ of December 2000, the ‘Taba agreements’ of January 2001
and the ‘Geneva Accords’ of December 2003 limited themselves to general principles,
including the setting up of an international compensation fund.
9 Reparations to Palestinian
refugees
The politics of saying ‘sorry’1
Shahira Samy
Introduction
On 22 December 2007, the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, ran a short news item about
Israeli President Shimon Peres apologizing for the Kafr Qasem massacre of 1956,
in which Border Police Officers killed 47 residents of the village (Ha’aretz 2007).
‘A terrible event happened here in the past, and we are very sorry for it,’ Peres said.
‘I have chosen to visit Kafr Qasem, where in the past a very serious event occurred
that we greatly regret . . ..’ According to the newspaper, Kafr Qasem’s mayor Sami
Issa interprets these words as an apology, ‘“we regret” and “we apologize” are the
same thing,’ he said. Speaking with local leaders, Peres also used the word apology
according to the president’s spokeswoman. Peres is the first sitting president to
‘apologize’ for the massacre (Segev 2007). In his comment on Peres’ apology five
days later, Israeli historian Tom Segev highlighted the links between this massacre
and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem through existing plans to expel
the village’s inhabitants to Jordan (Segev 2007).2
Although this incident concerns a specific small-scale injustice, the scholarship
of the new historians has unravelled the links between such massacres in the land
of historical Palestine and the creation of the overall Palestinian refugee problem.
This situation thus touches on a much larger population than the inhabitants of Kafr
Qasem. Peres’ visit and signs of remorse bring into the forefront the question of
what modes of redress are adequate to the plight of the Palestinian refugee com-
munity. In this context, how an alleged apology ought to be viewed from a redress
perspective and compared to worldwide acts of remorse and contrition is what this
chapter seeks to explore.
Palestinian refugees presently stand as the largest and most protracted case of dis-
placement in the world. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) census, the number of registered Palestinian
refugees in June 2009 stands at 4,718,899 (UNRWA 2010c) representing approxi-
mately 18 per cent of the total number of refugees in the world. UNRWA’s figure
covers about three-quarters of Palestinian refugees worldwide.3
The multidimensional nature of the Palestinian refugee problem marks it as
an issue going far beyond being a mere case of displacement. The Palestinian
refugee problem is primarily an intrinsic part, not only of the Israeli–Palestinian
148 Shahira Samy
conflict, but also the wider Arab–Israeli one as well. This complex nature has had
its impact on the various solutions put forward throughout the history of the conflict
in an attempt to seal the refugee problem. Consequently, such is the context within
which issues such as the right of return of refugees, resettlement and reparations
are examined.
While acknowledging the centrality of repatriation and resettlement to an even-
tual solution to the Palestinian refugee issue, the present chapter will solely focus
on the reparations dossier. Worth noting is that whereas repatriation and resettle-
ment are mutually exclusive, due to their spatial nature, the issue of reparations
– as perceived by this study – stands on a different level and is not necessarily a
substitute to either of them.
Efforts to deal with the refugee problem are ongoing, despite the stalemate in
formal negotiations. In the midst of such efforts, and for the purpose of settling
the refugee issue with the adequate dose of justice and de facto application of
such justice, the issue should not only be addressed, but also more necessarily,
redressed.
This chapter thus seeks to focus on the politics of reparations in relation to
Palestinian refugees. Reparations in this context are not approached from a legal
perspective, nor are issues concerning technicalities of compensation and modali-
ties of payment examined. Rather, reparations are tackled as a form of transitional
justice. In that sense, reparations are viewed as a political process whereby displace-
ment and dispossession are regarded as a historical injustice in search of adequate
redress, rather than as a classical case of displacement calling for the measures
devised by the international regime of durable solutions. How parties to a conflict
approach reparations, how they conceive of a historical injustice and how they
address redress to that injustice are all crucial elements to a reparations cycle.
This does not imply that both perspectives do not overlap. On the contrary, they
ought to be viewed as complementary, thus bearing fruits on none other than the par-
ties seeking to move to a post-conflict situation through redressing a past injustice.
In short, the modern literature and best practice of reparations worldwide is brought
in to the Palestinian refugee issue in an attempt to view it from a fresh angle and
contribute to the chances of a sustainable solution. The diversity of the case studies
may lead to a first-hand impulse to dismiss them as irrelevant to the Palestinian
case. However, the value of these cases is to highlight the process of reparations
itself in addition to its various elements. Such a scrutiny of process, as opposed to
specificity of detail, puts the three cases under focus (the Korean case, the Japanese
American case and the Palestinian case) on par for fruitful comparison.
A valid question at this point is about what reparations are in more concrete terms
and what forms they take. The following section presents a general brief notion of
reparations, a concept born in the sphere of law, later evolving in other disciplines
as well. In the course of the chapter, I will further proceed to focus on apology as a
form of reparation. Specific attention is directed towards how international practice
in post-conflict situations approaches apologies in a quest for redress. The analysis
will particularly seek to unravel the dual relationship between compensation and
apology. International practice spells out the friction between both. Can apology
Reparations to Palestinian refugees 149
suffice as a mode of redress? On the other extreme, is obtaining compensation a
satisfactory measure to provide a sense of justice and redress? This chapter will
probe those issues and present the cases of Korean comfort women and Japanese
American internment as examples of how international practice has reacted to this
tension.
This paves the way to the final section highlighting the history of how the
Palestinian refugee issue has been approached in diplomacy as far as compensation
and apology are concerned. The study ends with drawing parallels between interna-
tional practice regarding reparations and the evolution of the Palestinian case. It will
argue that addressing the Palestinian refugee case from a reparations perspective
ought to include recognition of the injustice for which an official apology is due.
Reparations as a notion of redress

[O]nly when present pain rooted in past harms was addressed and, to the extent
appropriate, redressed could there be justice. And only when there was justice could
there be reconciliation and a foundation for genuine hope and cooperation.
(Eric Yamamoto quoted in Minow 1998: 102)
Professor Yamamoto’s quote encompasses the many ingredients found in the general
notion of redress: the search for an adequate address to a past injustice in pursuit
of justice as a route to reconciliation.
Yamamoto’s depiction of reparations is the product of the intellectual and practi-
cal development of redress in modern international history. In its broader context,
the idea of redressing past injustices has significantly elaborated throughout the
course of the past century. And perhaps, the many confusing interlinked terms used
interchangeably with which the literature abounds – such as redress, reparations,
compensation and restitution – mostly reflect the need to understand why nations
apologize, the meaning of human injustice, structuring a theory of redress and the
various forms of the latter.
Grappling with a definition of reparations is no easy task. Scattered between
disciplines as diversified as law, philosophy, politics and history, various approaches
to the notion of reparations surface in the literature. In that context, it is important
to note that reparations first emerged as a legal concept and continues to be of great
interest to legal scholarship.
In general, the international law understanding of justice is the address of the
commitment of a wrongful act through various legal redress forms already previ-
ously determined such as restitution of property, compensation and satisfaction.4 If
such is the nature of the legal approach to reparations, other disciplines have gener-
ally discussed violations of human rights as a wrongful act necessitating redress, the
former not necessarily being a breach of law, nor the latter aiming at ascertaining a
right. The other approaches to reparations view it as a path to remedy injury caused
by a wrongful act. In simpler words, it’s the idea of how parties approach redress
to a historical injustice in order to move to a post-conflict situation.
150 Shahira Samy
This study approaches reparations as a broad umbrella term for redress taking a
variety of forms. What form is most adequate is not a pre-fixed formula, and this,
in fact, is the major characteristic of reparations as a mechanism of transitional
justice.
South African judge and international war crimes prosecutor, Richard Goldstone,
addresses this matter in the following statement:
In a perfect society victims are entitled to full justice, namely trial of perpetra-
tors and if found guilty adequate punishment. That ideal not being possible some
societies find other solutions. A national amnesia is bound to fail. Managing
the past has to be implemented but there is no standard formula. In most cases
the choices will be limited by political, military and economic conditions. And
whatever solutions, the results will be mixed.
(Richard Goldstone quoted in Minow 1998: x)
Goldstone’s quote emphasizes that the various approaches to reparations are in fact
an array of interpretations of justice and attempts to operationalize it. The search
for justice and the route best taken in its pursuit is the subject matter of thoughts
offered in regard to reparations as a general notion of redress. Such as the case
with other philosophical terms, there is no consensus either on the meaning or on
the applicability of justice in the international realm.
Rights then, the obligation to amend an injustice and remedies, is the language
spoken by international law in pursuit of justice through reparations. Other disci-
plines draw on a different vocabulary and points of reference in their search for
justice, moving away from punishment and the obligation element heavily evident
in the legal approach. Absent may the obligation be, the responsibility if not legal
– rather moral or out of self-interest – is there.
The various forms of remedy have also developed throughout the international
quest for redressing injustices. In its entry on reparations, the Penguin Dictionary
of International Relations sheds light on this development. Penguin defines the
term as follows:
[C]ompensation claims made of an effected upon vanquished by the victors fol-

lowing the cessation of hostilities. Reparations may involve financial payments
and/or physical requisition of goods. By exercising reparations the victor (s)
may be seeking to indemnify itself/themselves for losses incurred during the
war. Additionally, reparations may be seen as an instrument that will reduce
the ability of the vanquished to wage war or otherwise pose a security threat
in the future.
(Evans and Newnham 1998)
The concept of reparations has moved on since this definition was coined. Strictly
linking reparations to an act of war is an issue that has evolved to a more associ-
ated connection with a broad notion of a historical injustice, and distanced from
the concept of victor/vanquished as highlighted in the above-stated definition. The
development of the concept also progressed towards a wider inclusion of forms
of redress. The latter, as outlined by the definition, were confined to financial
payments in addition to restitution proper. The incorporation of other forms of
reparations such as apologies, for instance, is a novel phenomenon in the sphere
of reparations practice.
Moreover, the futuristic look included in the above-stated definition, by deem-
ing the act of reparations as an element catalysing non-repetition of war, has also
broadened to a future-looking perspective concerned with reconciliation between
the conflicting parties.
This brings us to the discussion of forms of reparations and the connections
between apologies and compensation. A question predominantly posed in the lit-
erature on reparations is formulated as follows: is there a hierarchy of forms of
redress and a most-adequate model? Is there one adequate form of redress? Should
governments issue apologies? Should apologies be made in conjunction with pay-
ments to victims? Could redress consist of money paid to victims without issuing an
apology? Does money have to reach victims themselves or could it be in the form
of investments, services or both in the victim’s community in lieu of compensating
victims individually? (See, for example, Brooks 1999a: 8.)
Apology and compensation as forms of reparations

Whereas compensation was recognized as an early form of reparations, apology
only emerged recently, but soon became particularly evident in a number of cases
in the modern history of reparations. As recently as February 2008, the Australian
parliament issued an official apology to its Aborigine population for the policies
of assimilation practised against its members in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (see for example Samy 2008). In the following pages, I wish to highlight
two particular examples: the case of the Korean comfort women and that of the
internment of Japanese Americans. Combined, these cases illustrate the prominence
of an apology within a reparations claim, as well as the dual relationship between
apology and financial compensation among other issues.
The two cases: Korean and Japanese American
The Korean comfort women

Known as ‘comfort women’ for their forced role of providing ‘comfort’ to the
Japanese troops in military brothels during the Second World War, they are also
called halmoni (grandmothers) in Korea, where many of these women originated.
‘Sex slaves’ is another term associated with them. Up to 200,000 comfort women
were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Army from around 1932 to the
end of the Second World War. The Japanese government denies responsibility for
the system. Sixty years after the end of the war, survivors of the sexual slavery
system are denied justice and are still calling for full reparations.
Although the existence of the comfort women operation (jugun ianfu) was first
exposed in 1948 when Batavia (now Jakarta) hosted public trials concerning the
152 Shahira Samy
sexual internment of Dutch women, it was not until 1990 that a Japanese official,
Prime Minister Miyazawa Kichi, offered an unofficial apology for the acts per-
petrated by the military against the comfort women.5 More recently, the Japanese
Diet, although refusing to issue an apology, has allocated money to administer
a fund for Asian women. The form and source of such redress, however, raised
important questions (Brooks 1999b: 87). More controversial than Japan’s refusal
to apologize was its approach to monetary redress. Japan established the Asian
Women’s Fund to aid comfort women in need and support projects addressing
contemporary women’s issues. The fund purports to represent the Japanese people’s
‘feelings of apology and remorse’ by allowing them to contribute directly. The fund
is financed by private donations and the government only pays administrative fees
(Brooks 1999a: 89).
This attempt of redress was met by criticism. Comfort women and advocacy
organizations argue that this is not redress in the form of reparations, for atone-
ment can only be achieved through money paid by the government in the form of
personal compensation, along with a formal apology from the Diet. They maintain
that the Asian Women’s Fund is a welfare system because individual payments are
based on socio-economic needs rather than moral restitution. Such payments add to
the overall sense that Japan is failing to take responsibility for its actions (Brooks
1999a: 89, Hicks 1999: 113–25).
It took changing attitudes towards women’s rights, as well as campaigns by
women, to turn the comfort women issue into a larger one over women’s rights
(Hicks 1999: 114). At some point in 1990, Emperor Akihito expressed ‘intense
sorrow’ at the wrongs inflicted on Korea. Korean activists however did not regard
this as atonement for the lack of adequate apology (Hicks 1999: 116). Meanwhile,
in June 1990, the Japanese foreign ministry denied any government responsibility
for the sexual slavery of Korean women. No public apology, disclosure, memorial
or compensation was forthcoming (Hicks 1999: 117). Many women refused the
payments, seeing them as an attempt by Japan to evade its responsibility. Only
about 260 former sex slaves received money – 2 million yen (£10,110) each. The
fund was discontinued in 2007 and no plans have been announced for a replacement
(McCurry 2005). To this day, the Diet has not issued an official apology.
Prior to moving on in the analysis, it may be useful to shed light on the struggle
of the Japanese Americans for redress in order to evaluate similarities and differ-
ences between the two reparations movements in their approach to apology and
compensation.
US reparations to Japanese Americans

The roots of the Japanese American reparations movement are anchored in the
search for redress by Americans of Japanese origins for the unfounded incarcera-
tion of 120,000 of their community by the US government in 1942. At the peak
of rivalries between the two countries during the Second World War, the targeted
population was suspected of treason and collaboration with the enemy.
In response to a congressional inquiry, political lobbying and lawsuits, Congress
passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Through the Act, Congress authorized a
presidential apology and the payment of $1.2 billion in compensation to Japanese
Americans incarcerated by the USA without charges or trial on account of their
race (see Yamamoto and Ebesgugawa 2006: 257–83). In addition to apology and
compensation, the 1988 Act also created a fund to educate the public about the
government’s false assertion of ‘national security’ to restrict civil liberties.
President Reagan signed into law the bill that expressed apology as well as
authorized financial compensation. On that occasion Reagan said ‘no payment can
make up for those lost years. What is most important in this bill has less to do with
property than with honor, for here we admit wrong’ (Minow 1998: 112–13). The
apology mandated by the Civil liberties Act was ultimately made through a letter
from President George Bush to each person eligible for reparations. The repara-
tions cheque accompanied the letter, both of which were sent by registered mail
(Yamamoto and Ebesgugawa 2006: 274).
The Japanese American redress movement was onerous. Many Japanese
Americans contributed, and their community overwhelmingly considered repara-
tions a great victory. As Yamamoto and Ebesgugawa point out, in a successful
reparations movement an entire community re-engages with the issues of justice
and belonging (Yamamoto and Ebesgugawa 2006: 258).
The dynamics
The journey of the Japanese Americans and the Korean comfort women towards
the search for reparations to the historical injustice inflicted upon them signals a
number of observations about the inclusion of apology and compensation within
a reparations process.
To start with, the two case studies draw attention to how intricately related com-
pensation and apologies are to both the victims and perpetrators’ acknowledgement
of the wrongful act. The latter may appear as an inclusion of what may at first sight
be interpreted as a new element in the equation of forms of reparations. However,
‘acknowledgement of the wrongful act’ has never been absent from the discussion
revolving around both forms of reparations. This issue is perhaps more apparent in
the case of the Korean comfort women than in that of the Japanese Americans. In
the Japanese American case, recognition of the wrongful act was never contested.
The struggle for reparations was concentrated on lobbying Congress for redress,
rather than seeking to prove the injustice took place. However, in the Korean
comfort women’s case, there was denial of the injustice occurring, then significant
resistance to the mere acknowledgement of responsibility for the injustice, let
alone offering reparations. In fact, this very much resembles the case of Israel’s
official stance denying responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian exodus.
Apology in the context of Korean comfort women thus represents the approach
to the issue of acknowledging the creation of the injustice, and by consequence,
responsibility to repair.
This very question of acknowledging a wrongful act and the willingness to
redress on behalf of perpetrators is sometimes mistakenly taken for granted. Such
154 Shahira Samy
an argument perceives the international system prevailing in the aftermath of the
Second World War as a political environment where morality and justice are replac-
ing realpolitik as the drive for politics, and thus increased attention is paid to moral
responsibility. We see this quite clearly in the arguments advocated by Elazar Barkan
(Barkan 2000: xi). According to this line of thought, the need for redress to past
victims has become a major part of national politics and international diplomacy
(Barkan 2003: 91). Barkan even pushes it to the point whereby ‘the moral dispute
[over historical injustices] has come to be about interpretations, means, and timing,
more than about principle’ (Barkan 2000: xii).
This opinion is often mentioned in the literature on reparations to highlight the
atonement aspect of the US government and its desire to seek contrition for the
internment of the Japanese Americans. Yet, advocates of this opinion neglect the
fact that such an apology wouldn’t have occurred without the campaign pushing
for it. The same applies to the Korean comfort women case, whose plight may
have never come to light had it not been for the efforts exerted by the victimized
group. As a thoughtful African American, lamenting the hitherto unsuccessful cam-
paign for reparations for slavery put it in reaction to the success of the Japanese
American case: ‘why them and not us?’ (quoted in Yamamoto and Ebesgugawa
2006: 276–7).
It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect upon the description of the Japanese
American reparations as ‘successful’. This observation in fact heralds an important
question: what exactly are the criteria for the success of a reparations act? By con-
sequence, to what extent does a notion of ‘success’ relate to the duality of apology
and compensation in the context of modern reparations processes?
From the discussion above, the notion of successful reparations to both the vic-
timized group in search of redress, as well as to the scholarship devoted to the issue
seems to relate to matters such as the nature of apology, the scope of the damage
or loss at stake, in addition to the question of hierarchy and most adequate forms
of reparations. These are sometimes expressed in the literature as the ‘complexity’
and ‘completeness’ of reparations processes. The following paragraphs elaborate
on the matter.
In the case of Korean comfort women, on the one hand, the notion of success
could not be fulfilled without an official apology. To them, unofficial acts did not
count. And an act of remorse clearly identifying the government’s responsibility
towards the injustice they suffered would have to precede/accompany financial pay-
ments. The Japanese American case, on the other hand, was perceived by its victims
as successful for the official apology accompanied by an act of compensation.
The ongoing debate over such issues in the literature reveals a diversity of opin-
ions though. One argument mainly attributes the success of this reparations case
to its ability to quantify a historical injustice and translate it into a specific sum
acceptable to both the victims and perpetrators as compensation (Barkan 2003:
95–6, Brooks 1999a). On the other side of the spectrum, the success of the Japanese
American programme comes on sole account of the government’s apology and
bestowal of symbolic reparations fostering long overdue healing for many, thus
restoring a measure of dignity (Yamamoto and Ebesgugawa 2006: 276–7). In fact,
the explicit aim and the actual effects of the reparations law in the case of the
Japanese Americans is considered to illustrate the symbolic significance of official
acknowledgement of wrongdoing in paying respect to a community of survivors
(Minow 1998: 100).
In this context, public acknowledgements of wrongdoing and statements of
contrition are considered to reflect a growing international interest in restorative
steps towards justice. However, apologies are thought to be superficial, insincere
or meaningless unless accompanied by direct and immediate actions such as pay-
ment of compensation that manifest responsibility for the violations (Minow 1998:
114–16).
This directs the discussion to issues of ‘complexity’ and ‘completeness’ of repara-
tions programmes, which I wish to discuss in order to further highlight the duality
of apology and compensation in the context of reparations.
Complexity implies there is no mutual exclusivity between apology and com-
pensation as a most adequate form of reparations. In his taxonomy of reparations,
Pablo De Greiff underscores the importance of designing reparations programmes
that are ‘complex’ in the sense that they distribute a variety of benefits (material
and symbolic) such as apology and compensation. From such a perspective, a
reparations programme should ideally display integrity, therefore delivering more
than one kind of benefit, which should internally support one another (De Greiff
2006: 2).
This is the very reason why the Japanese American reparations programme is
described as successful. It has been able to establish links between material com-
pensation and other forms of reparations such as official apologies and educational
initiatives despite the fact it provided to individual beneficiaries what in the US
context are not tremendous bountiful benefits (De Greiff 2006: 4).
In fact, in the case of displacement in particular, a relevant argument is put
forward as follows: if redress is to promote justice for refugees, it must not only
involve compensation for lost property, but also the return of property and account-
ability for the human rights violations that led to and exacerbated displacement
(Bradley 2005: 14). Compensation alone may be seen as a means of legitimizing
human rights violations, particularly ethnic cleansing, as it may mistakenly imply
that money can substitute for the protection of human rights. Here, compensation
alone becomes more problematic as a form of reparation as it may be perceived as
releasing the state from any further obligations towards refugees, usually without
admitting responsibility for any wrong-doing (Bradley 2005: 14).
Discussing apology and compensation as forms of reparations also relates to the
issue of the nature of the loss, damage and related remedy. Apology and compensa-
tion may ultimately cover various perceptions of loss and damage thus offsetting
a sense of injustice that may be felt by a particular category of victims. It is worth
noting that ‘completeness’ of a reparations programme refers to the ability of the
programme to cover, at least in principle, the whole universe of potential benefi-
ciaries. Leaving categories of crimes or victims unaddressed virtually guarantees
that the issue of reparations will continue to be on the political agenda (De Greiff
2006: 6–10; Minow 1998: 93).
156 Shahira Samy
Even though planners of a designed compensation programme may take all pos-
sible measures to provide justice, a sense of injustice will still prevail. Compensation
by default is designed, calculated and pre-fixed and some victims may unavoidably
be jeopardized. Apology, as a general act of contrition, has the potential of cover-
ing each and every individual harm as personally perceived by individual victims,
and may thus provide a more overarching sense of justice and acknowledgement
of a past harm.
In the context of displacement in particular, the full restitution approach (Restitutio
in integrum) has addressed this issue. Proponents of this approach acknowledge that
in order to repair the bond between the refugee and the state of origin, the reparations
process must address both material and moral damages. While property restitution
and compensation may be used to repair material harms and promote physical secu-
rity and well-being, moral damages are better addressed through apologies, trials
and truth commissions designed to uphold state accountability. The responsible
state is obliged to provide full restitution that not only addresses property issues
but also speaks to non-material human rights violations through mechanisms such
as apologies (see Bradley 2005: 14–15).
The overall debate over apology and compensation as forms of reparations
illustrates how both issues are intricately interlinked, and are at the forefront of
perceptions of justice when parties approach a conflict and wish to move on to a
post-conflict situation in which a past harm is adequately redressed. The following
section highlights how diplomacy has approached issues of apology, compensation
and acknowledgement of a wrongful act in the context of the search for a remedy
to the Palestinian displacement and dispossession.
The Palestinian refugee case

Numerous rounds of negotiations since the end of the 1948 war and first waves
of Palestinian displacement have tackled one aspect or the other of the refugee
problem. This section overviews how compensation, apology and related acknowl-
edgement of the injustice appeared in the various rounds of negotiations, and reflects
on how parties have approached those interlinked issues. This overview will high-
light the contrast between international practice placing weight on the duality of
apology/compensation on the one hand, and the Palestinian–Israeli peace track
overlooking the centrality of apology and acknowledgement of the wrongful act
within the search for remedy to Palestinian displacement and dispossession on the
other hand.
Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations are presently grounded in an internation-
ally designed peace blueprint drafted by an international quartet comprised of the
United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations (UN). The Road
Map concerned with establishing a Palestinian state in the first instance hasn’t put
forward any vision for the refugee issue, which leaves the door open as to what
may come next in relation to the refugee dossier. The Road Map in fact follows the
same trend that emerged since the inception of the conflict in treating the refugee
file as part of an overall conflict.
The Road Map also established as one of its foundations the Beirut Arab summit
declaration of March 2002. The summit’s vague declaration section on refugees
called for ‘achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be
agreed upon in accordance with 194’.6 Apart from that, the Road Map is silent on
all aspects of how the refugee issue might be resolved.
The first international response to the Palestinian refugee problem was in 1948
with the establishment of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine
(UNCCP) by virtue of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (herein-
after 194). The UNCCP set off with the general task of assisting the governments
and authorities concerned to achieve a final settlement of the Palestine question,
to provide protection and promote a durable solution for Palestine refugees. It was
argued that if the refugees could be resettled and/or repatriated, the major obstacle to
a peace settlement would be removed. Thus, proposals for coping with the refugees
shifted back and fro between repatriation to Israel or resettlement in the surrounding
Arab countries (Peretz 2001: 2; Takkenberg 1998: 25). When little or no progress
on repatriation or resettlement was achieved, the UNCCP concentrated on refugee
compensation as per 194 as a means of opening the door to peace talks. Israel,
however, insisted that discussion be limited to the technical aspects of property
evaluation and the UNCCP ultimately failed to effect any substantial agreement
on compensation (Takkenberg 1998: 27; Peretz 2001: 13). By the middle of the
1950s, even compensation had waned in importance.
The beginning of the 1990s and the convening of the Madrid peace process was
another international attempt to revive dormant efforts of peace between Palestinians
and Israelis. Forty years after the third-party effort of the UN, the peace process
was conceived beyond the direct auspice of the international organization and was
based on Security Council Resolution 242 rather than 194, the former open to looser
interpretation than the latter.7
The refugee issue was discussed in Madrid on a multilateral track although by
virtue of the nature of the peace initiative after years of dormant negotiations, the
refugee question was treated on humanitarian considerations and no discussion of
the reparations question took place. Overall, the Refugee Working Group (RWG)
established by the Madrid process was an international framework in which certain
aspects of the refugee problem were discussed among others.8 It is worth noting
in the context of the present analysis that the first negotiating round between the
parties to the conflict illustrated differences between the publicly articulated posi-
tions of Israel and the Palestinians on the refugee issue, with the former insisting
on the resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees, while the latter emphasizing the
Palestinians’ right to compensation and return. These may therefore be considered
as differences over both the nature of the refugee issue and thus the level of a solu-
tion, the views reflecting a perception of a legal problem vs. a humanitarian one. As
Brynen describes the RWG, it was a process of ‘quasi-negotiation’ characterized
by disagreement among the parties as to whether they are negotiating, and what it
is they might be negotiating about (Brynen 1997).
Soon after, the Oslo Agreements signed between Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993 shifted the focus of the peace efforts from
158 Shahira Samy
multilateral tracks as envisaged by the Madrid Framework, to a bilateral path and
deferred discussion of the refugee issue to final status negotiations that eventually
never took place.
The Camp David summit convened by the US in 2000 was an attempt to bring
together the two parties’ leaders for an overall agreement. With the weight of the
discussion more tilted towards the issues of Jerusalem and borders, the summit in
fact lacked in-depth discussion of the refugee question in general and reparations
in particular, and only succeeded in paving the way for the Second Intifada.9
Interestingly, a few months later, the Taba negotiations, confined to the Israeli
and Palestinian delegations, produced what most analysts deemed to be the most
comprehensive discussions of the refugee file, especially in terms of compensation,
although concretely no agreement was reached.10
Reflecting on the Taba talks, Yossi Beilin, chief Israeli negotiator on the refugee
file, describes the compensation issue as complex but, he said, ‘it can be resolved’
through the refugee rehabilitation channel facilitated by funds to be collected from
various entities worldwide. The pending issues, according to the Israeli negotiator,
were to address ‘what the Palestinians call Right of Return’ and the question of the
responsibility for creation of the refugee problem (see Beilin 2004: 230–9).
On the question of responsibility in particular, Beilin outlines the Israeli per-
spective in its non-paper where it stated acceptance of responsibility for being a
partner in its solution (emphasis added). The Israeli non-paper did not contain an
explicit acceptance of 194. Israel was in fact not accepting responsibility in its legal
sense nor by implication a responsibility in the creation of the injustice. Instead, it
offered a joint historical narrative in collaboration with the Palestinian side. Beilin
states that the agreement would include a concise history of events in the eyes of
each party, recognition of the suffering and distress of the refugees and separate
interpretations of 194 (Beilin 2004: 230–9). In contrast, in their non-paper at Taba,
Palestinians had demanded that Israel recognize its moral and legal responsibility
for the forced displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian civilian population
during the 1948 war, and for preventing the right of return of the refugees to their
homes in compliance with 194 (Palestinian Refugee Research Net 2001).
This overview of the diplomatic trajectory of Palestinian–Israeli negotiations
triggers a number of reflections: In spite of the more detailed discussions at Taba,
have the parties’ positions regarding a solution to the refugee problem from a
reparations perspective changed over the decades of peace-related efforts? The
principal Israeli preconditions as presented at the mediation conferences of the
UNCCP, were mainly that it accepted no moral or political responsibility for the
creation of the refugee problem, that compensation should be part of a general peace
settlement and that there would be no restitution of property (Lynk 2003; Peretz
2001: 88; Caplan 1993)11 In addition to these principles was the Israeli insistence
that compensation be poured into a collective fund, which would be utilized for
the resettlement of the refugees elsewhere, reflecting its optimal solution to the
refugee problem. The essence in the Israeli position since the first peace efforts in
1949 has remained unchanged all through.
The Palestinian – initially Arab – position on the other hand at the UNCCP
mediation conference, was that Israel bore the principal responsibility for paying
compensation. In the event that Israel would be unable to pay the full amount, the
Arab position considered the UN also responsible because of its role in the 1948
partition. The Arabs further insisted that Palestinian refugees had to be given free
choice about returning to their homes, and only then could compensation be deter-
mined as between those returning and those resettling elsewhere. They have also
demanded that compensation be paid to individual claimants should reflect the
true value of the property and that the refugees must be represented at the differ-
ent stages of the negotiations. At present, the Palestinian position is anchored on
demanding implementation of 194, demands acknowledgement of responsibility
and is willing to discuss compensation on a rights-based approach.
This very brief overview highlights how the main baggage of 60 years of diplo-
macy consists of the treatment of the refugee issue on two different levels: Israel
treating it as a humanitarian condition, on the one hand, its voluntary benevolent
responsibility mainly based on alleviating a welfare situation; the Palestinian side,
on the other hand, approaches the refugee issue as an injustice calling for redress
through the adequate rights devised by international law. There has never been
agreement over the acknowledgement of responsibility, admission of the injustice,
moral contrition or modes of redress. It thus comes as no surprise that a reparations
agreement was never concluded, despite high hopes in Taba engendered by detailed
discussions of technicalities of compensation programmes. This is largely due to
disparate macro political perceptions of the conflict rather than a micro faulty
compensation scheme.
Conclusion
The diplomatic history of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians attests to
the hitherto failed attempts to redress, or in some instances, merely ‘address’, the
refugee problem. Relentlessly falling under the banner of searching for solutions to
Palestinian displacement and dispossession, the various notions of solutions over-
viewed in the last section though seem to falter when scrutinized from a reparations
perspective.
This chapter has endeavoured to illustrate how successful reparations imply
addressing, in addition to adequately redressing, the injustice at the core of the
conflict en route to a post-conflict situation. The story narrated throughout the previ-
ous pages particularly focused on the duality of apology and compensation as two
forms of reparations. A predominant question was to probe whether international
practice favoured one or the other form as a most adequate mode of reparations.
Another question was to explore if both forms were in fact complimentary or rather
mutually exclusive. As noted by the analysis of the Korean comfort women and
Japanese American cases, there is no pre-designed prescription for reparations.
Nonetheless, acknowledgement of the wrongful act proved to be a prerequisite to
reparations. No matter what forms parties to a conflict decide to adopt as redress,
no reparations process in international practice seems to take place without the
acknowledgement of the injustice by its perpetrators.
160 Shahira Samy
The analysis has further illustrated that this issue of acknowledgement directly
relates to the enclosure of apology as form of redress. The dynamics of the Korean
comfort women’s search for redress, for example, has clearly shown how apology
was directly linked to acknowledgement of the injustice that was initially denied
by the Japanese government. Moreover, much as international practice illustrates
how the absence of apology is problematic to reparations, so are non-official apolo-
gies merely expressing regret, for their failure to denote responsibility, contrition
and the political willingness to redress a past injustice. In fact, the essence of what
differentiates an apology as part of a reparations process from what is an empty
meaningless gesture dismissed as hollow and worthless, is that very nuance between
‘we say sorry’ and ‘we are sorry’.
Nonetheless, this chapter has not targeted sole examination of the significance
of apology as a form of redress. Rather, emphasis has been placed on the duality of
apology and compensation as another form of reparation. International practice has
again demonstrated that the act of contrition remains fragile, as does the reparations
process, if not complemented by further modes of redress such as compensation.
By the same token, this chapter has also pointed out that monetary compensation
alone does not atone for the injustice unless accompanied or preceded by an official
apology.
Despite international practice stressing contrition and atonement as principal
elements of reparations, ‘sorry’, however, has been consistently absent from all
rounds of negotiating redress to Palestinian refugees. The Palestinian case has
shown that prospective solutions proposed to settle the refugee problem were more
tilted towards compensation alone as a desirable mode of redress. Accordingly,
there has been a tendency in diplomatic and scholarly circles to measure ‘success’
by a yardstick of calculations, technicalities of compensation mechanisms and
establishments of funds. Absent from the success criteria was an acknowledgement
of the wrongful act of displacement and dispossession, an official act of apology or
responsibility to redress creation of an injustice. The previous section has shown
that throughout the history of negotiations, the state of Israel was at most ready
to express regret for the plight of the refugees and their current dire humanitarian
condition. Such a regretful approach denies the refugee community recognition of
responsibility for its creation and is far from being an act of contrition addressed
to healing a past wrong. The matter is thus bereft of its political connotations to be
presented as a welfare humanitarian concern. From this perspective, it becomes
problematic to consider that the Taba negotiations, for example, were ‘almost there’
for the mere fact the talks progressed in matters of technicalities alone. For these
reasons, the Taba talks remain an incomplete blueprint for reparations.
The importance of a reparations process in modern history does not stem from
dwelling on the past and settling accounts between two rival camps. Reparations are
a mechanism to turn a wrongful past into a vehicle for a better future. This is only
possible by addressing the past and acknowledging the injustice that occurred – not
by overlooking it. The Israeli–Palestinian peace process has hitherto not managed
to establish even recognition of the injustice that lies at the core of the conflict and
a willingness to atone. A reparations process cannot seem further away.
Notes
1 An earlier draft of this chapter has appeared in the International Journal of Human
Rights (Samy 2010).
2 The soldiers involved in the incident were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, but all
received pardons. The brigade commander was sentenced to pay the symbolic fine of
10 prutot (old Israeli cents). According to Ha’aretz, Cabinet ministers have expressed
remorse several times in the past. Former education minister Yossi Sarid publicly apolo-
gized for the event and worked to add it to the national history curriculum in the 1990s.
Former tourism minister Moshe Katsav, who was later appointed president, also said
that the families of the victims deserve an apology (Ha’aretz 2007).
3 The writer is aware of limitations of the UNRWA definition of refugees. Figures are
presented as a general indication of the Palestinian refugee population.
4 See, for example, the International Law Commission articles on ‘State Responsibility’
and the draft basic principles and guidelines on the ‘Right to a Remedy and Reparation
for Victims of Violations of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Draft
Principles on Reparation)’, which were prepared under the auspices of the UN Special
Rapporteur on the right to restitution.
5 Under the comfort women system, an estimated 200,000 women were held as sex slaves
for the Japanese imperial army during the Second World War.
6 Paragraph 11 (iii) states that the General Assembly ‘resolves that the refugees wish-
ing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted
to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the
property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which,
under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the govern-
ments or authorities responsible’.
7 Article 2.b of Security Council Resolution 242 does not go beyond the vague statement
of affirming the necessity ‘[f]or achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem’.
8 For detailed analysis of the Madrid framework, see Peters (1996).
9 For accounts of the Camp David talks, see for example Agha and Malley (2001), Hanieh
(2001) and Ben-Ami (2005).
10 For accounts of the Taba negotiations, see for example Eldar (2002) and Beilin
(2004).
11 Except for a brief initiative in the early years of the conflict when restitution was
considered, see Masalha (2001).
Part IV
Memory, agency and
incorporation
10 ‘The one still surviving and
viable institution’
Sylvain Perdigon
Introduction
In the summer of 2008, Jam’iyyat In’ash al-Usra (The Society for Family
Rejuvenation), an important women’s non-governmental organization (NGO)
founded in 1965 and based in Al-Bireh, West Bank, commissioned to Sharif
Kanana, the living spiritual father of Palestinian anthropology, the organization of
a conference on ‘the role and the future of the Palestinian family’. The conference
program is noticeable for its robust language: the rhetoric is of one of speaking
the truth in an hour of emergency. After noting matter-of-factly that Palestinians
have witnessed over the last hundred years ‘the virtual destruction of their society’,
the planning committee propounds that ‘the family is the one still surviving and
viable institution among them’. It then goes on to express ‘the need for a critical
evaluation of the nature of the Palestinian family and the role it has played in their
struggle for survival’.1
While scholars of Palestinian communities have evolved specific ways of dem-
onstrating that the family constitutes ‘the one still surviving and viable institution’
amongst Palestinians, the ones first concerned seem to concur heartily. For example,
my interlocutors in the refugee camps of Tyre (South Lebanon), where I lived for
two years (2006–8) to conduct research on the ethics of refugee relatedness, often
speak of the Palestinian family as of an exceptional reality – one enduring in circum-
stances of otherwise permanent upheaval, and one that gives Palestinian experience
its distinct character and aura. In this chapter I shall not seek to either confirm or
question the validity of this claim for the Palestinian community of Tyre. Doing so
by assessing such specifics as residency and emigration patterns, the circulation and
sharing of diverse forms of capital between relatives or kin marriage rates would
yield results congruent with those of recent, excellent studies conducted in other
Palestinian settings (Latte Abdallah 2006; Rosenfeld 2004; Taraki 2006).
My aim is to bring out the peculiar truth and purchase this claim draws from its
circulation in everyday life – its routine appearance, as a compelling trope or link,
in the chain of words and silences that make ordinary family talk in the camps
and gatherings of Tyre. What compels, I ask, speakers who are also mothers and
fathers, daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, to reassert
so frequently the exceptionality of Palestinian family life? What do they allude to
when they do? What does this exceptionality consist of?
166 Sylvain Perdigon
Pointing out an exception, after all, is also often affirming that a rule exists in
other instances and acknowledging the power of this rule. My argument in this
short chapter is that when the Palestinian refugees of Tyre speak of the family as
the only institution that proved resilient to, and workable through, the calamity
that befell the Palestinian people and its way of life writ large, they do not only, or
primarily, refer to the continuities in patterns of family life that social scientists like
to foreground and analyze. In doing so, they also, and more significantly perhaps,
express a sense of departure from other inhabitants of this world: those who enjoy
a recognized citizenship and whose survival and self-realization, for this reason,
does not seem to hinge entirely on the branches of family trees. I suggest, in other
terms, that the language of the Palestinian family as a one-of-a-kind reality is
also one through which refugees register the open-ended deferment of Palestinian
sovereignty and, most importantly, its bearings upon the deep, intimate recesses
of their lives and relationships.
In order to do so, I start by briefly analyzing the circulation and collusion of
two discourses of the Palestinian family. One, traditionalist, associates Palestinian
kinship with tribal values and rules deemed unfit for grounding the political subjec-
tivity of modern citizens. The other, modernist, puts a premium on an understated
individualism congruent with the circumscribed role allocated to kin-based depend-
encies in the doctrine of the modern, liberal state. I then turn to a series of family
portraits, snapshots really, drawn from my time and encounters in the camps of
Tyre, in order to conjure up the thick, actual, plural worlds of refugee family life
that these two discourses fail to capture. Some of these vignettes are crisp, as it
were, while others are hazier. Some are close-ups while others remain at a distance
from individual subjects. The connections between them might seem, at first sight,
loose. I call them ‘snapshots’ to acknowledge that they are contingent upon my
situated, embodied point of view, and that much more lies out of the frame. In
spite of these limitations, such a strategy seems to me good enough, in the space
of a short chapter, to ‘increase the density of social representation to meet the den-
sity of actual social worlds’ (Povinelli 2006: 21), and their surprising patchiness
as well.
Various instances and configurations of cousin marriage are front-and-center
in all but one of these vignettes. Such unions account for a good quarter of the
750 marriages, from 1948 to the present, which I surveyed in the camps and gather-
ings of Tyre. By deliberately playing up a practice often surrounded by suspicion,
embarrassment, or controversy, I seek to lay bare the theoretical and descriptive
challenges posed by usages (of genealogical ties in this case) that camp inhabitants
carry on in defiance of the normative forms of relatedness promoted along liberal
forms of political organization. My aim is not to provide an explanation for the
persistence of relatively high rates of kin marriage in the camps and gatherings of
Tyre. Indeed I specifically question the assumption that such regularities would
reflect the unequivocal embrace, by Palestinian refugees, of a stable, clear-cut
template for family life in order to cope with the uncertainty of their environment.
One philosopher argued for the skeptical paradox that the following of a rule always
implies a ‘leap in the dark’ (Kripke 1982: 55). It is such leaps in the dark, separating
‘The one still surviving and viable institution’ 167
the rule (so-called preference for parallel cousin marriage is only one peculiarly
visible instance) from its actual bodying-forth in the everyday struggle for survival,
that I seek to point out in these vignettes. The darkness in this case is that of life
itself for a community whose political existence and place in the world remain in
indefinite abeyance. The leap is, I believe, what endows family life in the camps
and gatherings of Tyre with an aura of perpetual exceptionality.
Between the hamula and the NGO-sanctioned family

In studies conducted within the state of Israel from the late 1950s to the early 1970s,
British-educated Israeli anthropologists concerned themselves with the survival,
or revival, of a kinship principle they took to structure social organization in the
native Palestinian population (Cohen 1970, 1972; Rosenfeld 1957, 1958, 1968).
The focus was on the ubiquitous hamula, the best approximation they could find of
a clan, a ‘patrilineal association whose members were linked together by a network
of complex relationships’ (Cohen 1972: 3).2 They sought out its manifestations in
phenomena such as patrilineal endogamy or ‘political factionalism’ (Rosenfeld
1968: 740). The conclusion was often the same. Thus, for Rosenfeld, the state of
Israel had had no significant effect on social and economic life, ‘the Arab village
maintained a kin structure’ (1957: 59) expressive of a ‘feudal economy’ (1958:
1138). For Cohen, the resurgence of the hamula, ‘this old, indigenous form of
political organization’ (1972: xiii) followed from ‘weaknesses in the maintenance of
law and order in the villages by the [Israeli] government institutions’, and ‘cultural
and social continuities from the past’ (1972: 177).
Strikingly enough, these authors, in their examination of the hamula system,
hardly touched on the 1948 violence, the new relations of domination between Jews
and Arabs in Israel or the exceptional military regime applied to Palestinians until
1966. Such omissions led Talal Asad to denounce, in a sharp review of Cohen’s
book, the reversal in these works of ‘the logical priority of ethnicity over political
economy’ (Asad 1975: 259). Regarding the so-called resurgence of the hamula as a
principle of political organization after 1948, it was, for Asad, ‘only vulgar idealism
that allows Cohen to speak of the “same form”’ as the one that prevailed previously
(1975: 270). The hamula constituted little more after 1949 than a mode of control, an
imputed principle of identity and the only political existence allowed to ‘members
of an exploited class who are prevented, because of Israel’s Zionist structure, from
developing either a class-based or a nation-based political organization’ (1975: 273).
In other terms, Cohen’s concept of the hamula and ‘political patriliny’ turned out
to be, in Asad’s Marxist reading, ideological categories expressing the normative,
marginalized status of Israeli Arabs in a Zionist state.3
I cursorily mention this old controversy regarding Palestinians within the state of
Israel because it offers an important reminder: discourses that ostensibly constitute
kinship into a discrete domain frequently pertain in fact to the allocation of political
sovereignty. Speaking of family matters is often speaking of, and even for, the state
as well. While the colonial context of Israeli anthropology provides a peculiarly
visible example of this logic, there is probably more, here, than a reality relevant
to colonialism only: indeed, the effect of a Western political theology, epitomized
in Hegel’s famous reading of Antigone, which construes state authority as raising
above the pre-political order of kinship and, at the same time, secures it as its sup-
port and mediation (Butler 2000: 5). But does it mean, as Asad seems to suggest,
that there is no other materiality to the hamula, for example, than that of an effi-
cacious discourse of domination and marginalization? One would expect refugee
experience, whose context ironically reminds one of that in which the discipline
of anthropology came into its own as the study of kinship in so-called ‘stateless
societies’, to provide us with critical outlooks in this respect.
In the Palestinian camps of Tyre, I make people laugh, or give quizzical looks,
when I bring up the term hamula, which has little to no currency in everyday
language. What’s standard is a modernist narrative of the Palestinian family
that emphasizes sacrifices made by the first, largely uneducated, generation of
Palestinian exiles in order to make education available to their children, and the
achievements of the following generations, in Lebanon, in the Middle-East at large,
and beyond. With nationalistic undertones, this narrative foregrounds both values
of solidarity (al-ta’awun) held as traditional, and the resourcefulness and adapt-
ability of the Palestinian character. It describes education (al-ta’lim) itself as a
primary mediator of kin relatedness, and implies a temporality of kinship whereby
orientation is given by the generational increment of knowledge, and more gener-
ally the understanding that ‘parents will implement convention – ‘socializing their
children’ – while children will implement choice – making ‘their own lives’ (after
Strathern 1992: 19).
True, interlocutors often add to this narrative the important qualification that
refugee society, and in particular refugee camps, remain ‘conservative’ (mohafez)
or even ‘backward’ (mutakhallif) environments. But the invocation of conservatism
does not essentially alter the temporal direction fixed in and by the narrative that
describes the Palestinian family as moving away, in a restrained, appropriate fash-
ion, from its traditions: what it conjures up is a frozenness, a constriction of norms,
waiting for the release that would come with the accession of the Palestinian people
to political sovereignty. I take the widespread presence in refugee households of
Valentines – red and white teddy bears, cushions in the shape of hearts, with love
messages in English – as similarly indicating desires, pervasive in refugee society,
for globalizing forms of domesticity associated with the ‘intimate event’ of love,
‘exfoliating the individual from his or her social skin’ (Povinelli 2006): love (hobb),
not tradition, is, or ought to be, what makes families.
The gap between the aura of antiquity that my interlocutors attach to signi-
fiers such as hamula and the intensity with which they often inhabit a modernist
narrative of the family is intriguing. On the basis of her ethnographic work with
families of political activists in the West Bank during the first intifada, the anthro-
pologist Iris Jean-Klein made the provocative case that scholarly perspectives on
social transformation in the context of the Palestinian national struggle are often
obliquely biased by a form of political teleology. She argues that research on
Palestinian gender and relatedness is commonly driven by the researcher’s will
to demonstrate ‘that Palestinians [are] certain to be responsible modern political
citizens, and by assumptions about what modern citizens are’. Usually, the opera-
tion entails discreetly disconnecting them (for example through the foregrounding
of the intifada ‘committee’ as a sovereign, emancipatory field of sociality) from
the form of relationality indicated by local concepts of the house, dar and bayt,
deemed morally inferior and unfit for grounding the political subjectivity of modern
citizens (Jean-Klein 2003: 557–8).
Similar assumptions could be shown to inform the activities of local and interna-
tional actors active in the refugee society in Lebanon. It is, for example, apparent
in the iconography of a campaign launched in May 2006 by a coalition of local
NGOs to promote the civil rights of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, under the
title ‘huquq madaniyyeh wussulan li-haq al-’awda’ (translated as ‘Civil rights in
support of the right of return’). The poster advertising the campaign depicts a family
standing at the threshold of a road rising straight up to the horizon. This family is
not your idea of the hamula, not even of the typical bayt or dar: three members,
a young mum, unveiled, wearing a dress that barely covers her knees, a clean-cut
dad, and a single child. Again – but this time, in the framework of a democratic,
participatory form of political sovereignty – the underlying motif is one of the
sovereign state as drawing life from the family, at the same time as the good (but
still virtual) state sanctions a certain form of the good family.
In interviews I made in the camps and gatherings of Tyre, the endorsement of
the modernist narrative of the family outlined above often entails, in a similar
fashion, the discursive production of others – e.g. the fellah (peasant) out there
in Rashidiyyeh, the ‘ghurani’ up there in Burj al-Shamali,4 the badawi (Bedouin)
down there in the gatherings – whose family matters, interviewees presume, do
not abide by the same temporality of emancipation and for this reason are barely
intelligible, or only in the terms of jahl (such people are ignorant) or zu’ran (they
are thugs, scoundrels, rogues). It is frequently the case even when the interview
and genealogy of my interlocutor evince precisely the behaviors (frequent cousin
marriage, high fertility rates, recurrent upheavals associated with polygamy or
divorce and remarriage) that he (and, more rarely, she) will in other respects present
as aberrant or antiquated. One gets the sense, then, that a certain lived experi-
ence of the family in refugee camps and gatherings cannot simply be claimed or
accounted for.
It is this sense of unintelligibility that I would like now to interrogate. As I hope
to have made clear, I strongly suspect that it has to do with a political teleology of
the (good) state and the (good) family, whereby relations are given intelligibility
only when embedded in a liberal temporality of emancipation. There is little need
to emphasize that, in the current coordinates of Palestinian refugee experience,
the relevance of this political teleology is uncertain at best. I propose to turn to a
handful of snapshots from the camps and gatherings of Tyre in order to illustrate not
only how the uncertain status of Palestinian refugees in law produces such scripts
of az’ar (rogue) relatedness, but also as an attempt to capture, ethnographically,
individual subtexts that may return the intelligibility and dilemmas of kinship when
it is thus experienced in a perpetual state of exception.
Family trees, rawabit, and teddy bears
We’ve hardly been sitting for ten minutes in Abu ‘Ali’s reception room in his house
in al-Bass camp when he asks his son to bring what should be of interest to us: a
family tree drawn on a large piece of cardboard. It is an artifact he was finally able
to complete a few years ago, after a trip to Palestine in 1995 to collect the informa-
tion he needed on relatives who are still living in Galilee. The common ancestor,
six or seven generations away, lies at the bottom, and bears testimony to the rooting
of Bayt Hassan in al-Quds.5 A trunk rises from there, and then a forest of splitting
branches, including one that, associated with the place of al-’Abassiyyeh in North
Galilee, leads to al-Bass refugee camp in Tyre, and a leaf where Abu ‘Ali points to
the calligraphy of his own name and those of his male children.
We talk at length about the labor involved in producing this stunning piece of
work. Then, I explain to Abu ‘Ali that the family tree I would like to make with
him is of a different kind: we would start from him, and from there explore his
parents and grandparents, siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins and in-laws; that is,
where they (men and women) were born, their current whereabouts, their trades and
occupations, and the marriages they have contracted. Abu ‘Ali agrees excitedly, and
predicts that information collected in this manner will evince the fine character of
Bayt Hassan. Indeed the unfolding of the genealogical inquiry reveals a successful
refugee family trajectory: a first generation enabled by a small capital and arbori-
cultural skills brought from Palestine, finding a living in South Lebanon renting
and developing orange groves; a second generation urged to pursue education
opportunities, and able to secure good positions abroad (Saudi Arabia and Lybia)
or locally in the social services of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); a
third generation still in the making, but similarly encouraged to pursue promotion
through education and the acquisition of skills marketable in the world of today
(computer science and medicine).
If in the course of the interview Abu ‘Ali consistently emphasizes elements (such
as the increase of knowledge from one generation to the other) pertaining to a mod-
ernist narrative of the family, he is equally keen, indeed even more so, on making
clear for me that this successful story reflects the exceptional level of integration of
the family, based on a strict discipline (adab), which he attributes in turn to a shared
loyalty to an authentically Palestinian form of family life (taqalid). He explains how
Bayt Hassan, which makes up for 500 of the 5,000 inhabitants of al-Bass, holds
fiercely to a mraba’a (quarter) of the camp, at the price of considerable sacrifices
(he has gotten into debts in order to pay the $30,000 needed to buy a house for
his son rather than seeing him leaving the mraba’a). He describes the workings
of a rabita (family league; pl. rabwabit) system in Bayt Hassan, which manifests
itself for example in the mobilization of extended solidarity networks when one
member needs costly medical treatment, or in the tight control exerted over family
members tempted by such deviant behaviors as divorce or polygamy. He tells of
epic episodes when Bayt Hassan closed ranks in violent times, in the mid-1980s
against the Amal militia (‘we made clear we would kill ten Shi’a Lebanese for each
Hassan that would be hurt’), or more recently in a conflict with their archenemy
family in the camp. He points out for me, as we review family members, marriage
patterns repeated up to this day with another family from the same village in Galilee
but settled in a gathering outside the camp, and hints at an old hierarchical order at
work here when he lays upon the asymmetry in patterns of weekly visits. Marriages
amongst his immediate relatives also evince the power of genealogy for the making
of matrimony. His paternal and maternal grandparents were, respectively, awlad
khal (MBD marriage) and awlad ‘amm (FBD marriage).6 His mother (aged 77)
is bent ‘amma of his father (78) (FZD marriage). Two of his brothers (47 and 36)
and one of his sisters (30) are respectively married to two sisters (32 and 30) and
a brother (40) who are the children of Abu ‘Ali’s ‘amm and khala (that is, three
FBD/MZD marriages). Abu ‘Ali’s daughter (31) is married to his own cousin (32)
(FBSD marriage). The list could go on. (See Figure 10.1.)
I leave Abu ‘Ali with the impression that, throughout our encounter, he never
departed from the possibility for Palestinian kin relations to be told in the gram-
mar of what British anthropologists once called the ‘corporate group’ (e.g. Fortes
1970). An overview of the actual network he describes bears witness to the rhet-
orical efficacy of a model of relatedness that largely allocates decisions pertaining
to the facts of birth, marriage, childrearing and death to (the fiction of) a subject
at once collective and sovereign, formed around a principle of descent, and fit for
the refugee environment. Yet, if a figure of the patriarch haunts the realm of the
family, its first and foremost expression lies in the terms my male interlocutors often
impose to our conversation. Sitting on a shelf above Abu ‘Ali, next to a framed
picture of Yasser Arafat riding a white horse, a big, white teddy bear stares at me
in silence throughout the interview. ‘I love you!’ it proclaims in English, red heart
Figure 10.1 Marriages between relatives in Abu ‘Ali’s family.

it holds in its hands, and I wonder about the registers in which, today again, the
story was not told.
Jamal, Sara, and the vagaries of the law

At the age of 44, Jamal has not enjoyed much of the bare conviviality of Palestinian
refugee domesticity: until the age of seven, as he was living with his parents and
siblings in a camp in the West Bank, and then (1967) in the suburbs of Amman; and
since 1999, when he got married and started a family of his own, in Rashidiyyeh
camp. In the gap between these two periods, domesticity has meant for him a wide
array of arrangements. His mother was killed in 1970 during the assault of Jordanian
forces against Palestinian camps. His father left Jordan and placed him in a PLO-
funded orphanage in the Lebanese mountains (1970–3). Those were times when
PLO-sponsored trips to Lebanon often dispensed with official authorizations to enter
the country, so that the father’s decision turned out to be a fateful leap that propelled
his seven-year-old son into the existence of an illegal immigrant also barred from
returning to Jordan. Jamal’s father removed his son from the orphanage at the age
of ten and arranged for him to spend two years with a Christian foster family in
Jounieh (1973–6), which he had to leave in turn as Syrian troops made their first
move into Lebanon. It was the beginning of a peripatetic existence as feda’i in
military barracks, in ‘Ain al-Helwe camp (Saida, 1976–8), Arnun (South Lebanon,
1978–81), the basements of the Cité sportive (Beirut, 1981–2), and, throughout the
1980s, Tunis, the Beqaa Valley, Tripoli, Algeria, Beirut’s Borj al-Barajne camp,
‘Ain al-Helwe again, and finally, in the mid-1990s Rashidiyyeh – not to forget a
five-year interval in Syrian jails (1987–91). Jamal got married in Rashidiyyeh in
1999 and, for the first time, took a house of his own. The first, that is, in a series
of rented houses: residential instability remains a curse upon Jamal up to this day,
as the extremely precarious status of an ID-less refugee results for him in chronic
problems with landlords, sympathetic at first but soon tired of waiting for unpaid
rents, and the renewed predicament of having to find a place within the confines
of the camp.
Jamal’s wife Sara is from Rashidiyyeh. At 31, she is the last daughter of the
first wife of a polygamous, wandering father – a situation I found to be common
amongst former feda’is and ID-less households, as if the dispersed authority of
the father upon his progeny made room for the political-military leadership of the
camps to intervene more directly into the placement of young women. The marriage
she made, indeed, was a fateful leap in its own right. Given the patrilineal bias of
both Lebanese refugee identification policies and, until recently, those of UNRWA,
she knew, or maybe didn’t, that she would beget children with no existence in the
sphere of law. What mattered little in 1976 has virtually become a matter of life
and death, or at the very least a matter of what constitutes a life worth living, as
the Lebanese state seeks to reassert, however laboriously, its sovereignty over its
whole territory. As a matter of fact, Jamal’s last excursion to Tyre (a three-kilometer
journey) dates back to 1999, on the day of his wedding. Since then, he has not left
the camp, for fear of what would happen to his wife and children if he were to be
apprehended by the Lebanese authorities. In addition to the repeated humiliations
of everyday life – access to such necessaries as health services, schools, or hous-
ing is continuously contingent on negotiations he enters from the weaker side – he
and Sara bear the psychic and practical burden of imagining the future of their
two girls and one boy (aged six, five, and three) in a world they entered deprived
of any legal status.
Jamal’s situation, specific in some regards but not uncommon in the camps of
Southern Lebanon, displays in a peculiarly clear fashion the vulnerability of refugee
families to the vagaries over time of barely readable legal environments. A most
recent development at the time of our meeting (December 2006) illustrates again,
and poignantly, the point, as well as the agency and reach of sovereign decisions
that redistribute who falls within and without the boundaries of the law. In the
wake of the embargo on the Palestinian Authority that the United States and the
European Union decreed after Hamas’ victory in democratic parliamentary elec-
tions, the meager monthly allocation that Jamal was getting through Fatah from the
PLO was discontinued. Finding it mortifying after a few months to contract debt
upon debt, Sara decided to sell her marriage gold in order to reimburse the money
she owed to neighborhood shopkeepers she has known forever and who, she says,
are not doing that well either after all.
A great, unknown actress

To visitors like relatives settled faraway (Aleppo, Miami) but drawn back to Tyre,
at least in part, by the charisma of this most likeable figure, Emm Nasser likes to
offer the face of a 67-year-old woman blessed with a joyful, close-knit family. She
walks people around and emphasizes that all her four sons are not only married
but still living, with wives and offspring, in the dar – one next door, one upstairs,
and two on the other side of the alleyway – in a small gathering of refugees (origi-
nating in the lower classes of Haifa) that lies on one side of al-Bass. Two of her
sons are married to the two daughters of her own sister living in Aleppo (MBD
marriages). Her only daughter who left the dar did not go too far: she is married
in the camp across the main road. In such circumstances, Emm Nasser does not
fail to make explicit that what the visitor sees and what she’s been blessed with is
the merry implementation of a Palestinian script of dar relatedness. The reference
to Palestine, made in relation to a certain form of sociality, pertains here to self-
fashioning rather than a knowledge that the subject would enact while not being
in its full possession. A number of times, I have seen Emm Nasser rushing to the
house in order to put on her black, embroidered Palestinian dress so as to meet
visitors in the proper outfit. And my own, temporary integration in the dar has been
made in good part through dishes she brings to my house saying ‘nestlings don’t
thank the mother-bird when she brings them food’ and ‘hada akl falastini falastini
falastini, hada folklore’.7
However, Emm Nasser has slowly taught me, in bits of conversation, fragmen-
tary allusions, oblique hints, to recognize under this congenial facade the signs
of a tenacious melancholia, an undying grief whose extent I fully realized when
I first saw her staying solemnly at home as, in the first hours of al-’id, the rest of
the family was taking a trip up the hill to visit family graves. As for many women
of her generation, this melancholia has to do, no doubt, with the hardly speakable
memories of war(s) – 1982, in particular, the Israeli invasion, at which time her
house was flattened, her husband imprisoned, and the pick-up truck in which her
children were fleeing the South hit by Israeli shelling, leaving one of them between
life and death for months, and ‘nervous’ (m’asseb) since then; and then again 1986,
the War of the Camps, when two of her daughters suffered a violent assault at the
hands of Lebanese neighbors, from which they never psychically recovered.
But I also learnt to associate this grief with private experiences that set her apart
in the family, and a sense that youth was stolen from her by bereavement and the
circumstances in which she was made to enter matrimony at a very early age. Born
in Haifa in the early 1940s, Emm Nasser was six years old when she became an
orphan. Her father, a sailor in the British Navy, disappeared in the 1948 war. Her
mother died of grief a couple of years after that. Emm Nasser and her two sisters
grew up between the houses of various relatives in Palestine, before being placed
in an orphanage in al-Quds. When she was 13, her grandmother took her for a visit
to relatives in Tyre. She died as they were staying in al-Bass camp; Emm Nasser
was married to ibn ‘ammha (FBS), the future Abu Nasser, and she’s remained in
Tyre since then. This marriage between cousins was nothing like what fellahin do in
places like Rashidiyyeh, her sons are anxious to emphasize: there was hobb, love.
Still, I suspect that the fate of three, unmarried orphan daughters was a concern for
the family at large, and one for which solutions had to be found without delay.
I also wonder at times if what Emm Nasser silently grieves is not, as well, a
vocation impeded by the hardships of her coming of age, and more generally the
place allocated to her by this Palestinian script of domesticity she so ardently vin-
dicates. An unexpected effect of her vagrant early years was the opportunity she
got in al-Quds to appear on stages in theater projects organized by the orphanage,
and the deep fondness for acting that these experiences fostered. She named her
three daughters after famous Arab actresses of the 1950s and early 1960s. In the
1970s, she was able to turn up on theater stages again in cultural projects sponsored
by leftist Palestinian organizations. In the 1990s, she even got small engagements
in a couple of Iranian and Egyptian motion pictures shot in Southern Lebanon.
Neighborhood kids knows her for one you can count on if you need an elderly
woman for a part in a video project organized by one of the camp’s cultural centers.
Besides, she and her husband and offspring certainly have a talent to turn everyday
life into a masrahiyyah, a (mostly comical) theater play, but that’s another story.
We see with Emm Nasser how seemingly similar family configurations – her
family tree (see Figure 10.2) would not, overall, look very different from that of
Abu ‘Ali mentioned above – and indeed the compulsory use of similar normative
registers to speak of the family, may in fact indicate very different courses for the
same set of historical events (exodus and exile) to fold into relationships. Thus,
within the genealogical grid, that provides possibilities and even mandates for the
making of relationships, there may take place subjective formations that confound
this grid.
Figure 10.2 Marriages between relatives in Emm Nasser’s family.
Bachelors’ corniche
It’s July 2007. I meet Sma’in, 20, on the northern corniche of Tyre, which is buzzing
with people in the early hours of this hot summer night. We have a little chat. He tells
me that his sister Taghrid, who migrated to Germany a few years ago when getting
married to ibn khalitha (MZS), is here on a visit (see Figure 10.3). I am glad to hear
that, I tell him. When I conducted a long interview with his mother Fatmeh more
than a year ago, she had described to me in detail how contact between herself and
her daughter had been cut following a complicated dispute in the elders’ generation
about the allocation of a shelter in Jal al-Bahr, the Palestinian Bedouin gathering
where she lives at the northern periphery of Tyre. And not only had contact with
her daughter been cut, but with her son Hasan as well, who also lives in Germany:
Taghrid and Hasan are married respectively to the son and daughter of Fatmeh’s
sister – on paper, a case of badal, ‘exchange’ marriage, although it is also a word
that has all but disappeared from everyday language – and the elders’ dispute had
spread at a distance along family lines. So, I am glad to hear that things are getting
better, I tell Sma’in, because the pain of his mother was palpable when I met her
a year before. He appreciates my concerns, tells me he is going to transmit my
salutations, and that I should stop by anyway, to check out the laptop computer he
recently acquired and that he is working on connecting to the internet directly from
their tiny tin-roof house on the beach. And, after a silence, he asks me, again, only
half-jokingly, if really I would not know of a French girl he could marry in order
to enter Europe. ‘Even if she’s forty’, he specifies, in a burst of laughter.
On those animated summer evenings, this section of the northern corniche of
Tyre looks very much like a corniche des célibataires (bachelors’ corniche) – a
scene, like that of the ball conjured up by Bourdieu in 1950s Béarn, where the social
misery of structural outcasts is cruelly exposed (2002). Shabab (young men) from
Jal al-Bahr sit on the fence and watch girls passing by in small bands, while couples
Figure 10.3 Cousin marriages in Sma’in’s generation.
and families, including during the summer a significant number of emigrants who
came back for vacation, sit around plastic tables and enjoy a cup of tea or a nargileh.
Laughter, shouts, and teasing fill the air, but also envy and frustration. Because of
strictly enforced rules on construction work in Jal al-Bahr, which lies on a section of
the Lebanese coastline coveted by tourism investors, shabab consider it unrealistic
to start a household of their own in the gathering, whose cramped space is already
reaching a point of saturation. At the same time, their position in the labor market
and Lebanon’s refugee laws make it hardly conceivable for them to get a house in
a camp or in one of the new construction projects developing at the periphery of
Tyre. In such circumstances, emigration to Germany has taken on among shabab
the character of an obsession, as the only thinkable, desirable, route away from
the future that Jal al-Bahr offers in the form of a dead end. And due to the long-
established (1980s) presence of a large community from the gathering in Germany,
marrying a cousin has also become a pass to escape, through matrimony, the bio-
politics of the refugee regime: thus for Sma’in’s friend and neighbor Muhammad
who, without warning, celebrated two weeks ago his engagement with bint ‘ammo
(FBD), also here on a summer visit from Germany. For those, like Sma’in, not in
a position to claim a cousin for wife, there remains the life-and-death gamble of
illegal emigration, and fantasies of a romantic, or internet-negotiated, encounter
with a European woman.
I have had numerous such little chats over two years with shabab from Jal al-
Bahr. The imaginary of (being denied and recovering) citizenship looms large in
the nuptial fantasies that these young people exchange on the corniche of Tyre.
But the suggestion that they simply seek to use marriage in order to recover rights
they have been denied by virtue of being born refugees, while pertinent, seems to
me to be rather incomplete, especially in regard to the moral dilemmas with which
their elders apprehend the new generation’s fantasies. The youths, for their part,
consider for very good reasons that playing the marriage game in Jal al-Bahr is
pointless since it cannot lead up to the result on which it is premised, the collective
creation of hurmat al-bayt, a private realm. This sense of inhuman impossibility
drives some of them to evolve an alternative ethics of marriage, foregrounding the
imaginary of emigration and the plenitude associated with acquiring a recognized
citizenship, over the procedures of al-ma’rifah, familiarity based on long-lasting
inter-knowledge, that have long authorized the making of intimate worlds in Jal al-
Bahr. Some of their elders encourage and support these young people – not without
discomfort or even distress – in their pursuit of a form of marriage validated not by
al-ma’rifah, but by the escape it permits from the biopolitics of the refugee regime.
For others, the foregoing of al-ma’rifah in the making of intimacy indicates little
more than a frightful blindness to oneself and to the world.
Such moral dilemmas as to what validates marriage and the reality of its bond-
ing impregnate relationships with a pain that should not be underestimated. In the
process of writing this chapter, I decided that I should pay a visit to Fatmeh to ask
her how exactly the complex networks of alliances – a brother and a sister married
to a sister and a brother, who are also their matrilateral parallel cousins – came into
being. I had assumed until then that Fatmeh and her sister in Germany had more
or less arranged the matter, and indeed it is how the common friend who had first
introduced me to her more than one year before had described it to me. However,
the story Fatmeh had to tell was different, and it is a story she told me with tears in
her eyes. in In Jal al-Bahr five years previously, Taghrid received a visit from her
cousin, whom she hardly knew since he had been living in Germany for the last
two decades. At the second visit he asked for her hand in marriage. Fatmeh, whose
relations with her own sister are fraught with ambivalence, strongly advised Taghrid
against it. But I love the guy, said Taghrid. No, you do not, answered Fatmeh: what
you are enamored with is the idea of emigration. Taghrid said that she was free, and
the marriage was concluded. An overall similar story happened again a couple of
years later with Hasan. Now, it turns out that Taghrid is caught in Berlin in a very
unhappy marriage: Fatmeh speaks of her husband’s unemployment, of domestic
violence, of a recent escape to a shelter for battered women. During her visit last
summer, at the time I met Sma’in on the corniche, Taghrid said she wanted to stay
in Lebanon and get a divorce. You’d rather die in Germany, said Fatmeh, than come
back to this God-forsaken country. Taghrid went back to Germany.8
Conclusion: fleshing out the ‘state of exception’

Such vignettes illustrate, in their very patchiness, that there is no single way in which
the family constitutes ‘the one still surviving and viable institution’ for Palestinian
refugees in the camps and gatherings of Tyre. They support indeed the claim that, in
these spaces, kinship ties anchor everyday survival by providing generative charts
for thick material arrangements that frequently combine joint or fluid ownership,
cousin marriages and diasporic networks. But they show, too, that such arrange-
ments translate into a wide variety of familyscapes, configurations, and experiences.
And they make apparent that family members can be, and frequently are, quite
vulnerable to each other in these processes. In other terms, while my Palestinian
interlocutors in Tyre would agree that the family constitutes for them ‘the only still
surviving and viable institution’, it should not be taken to mean that they embrace
a stable, autonomous order of traditions and clear-cut injunctions associated with
a transparent notion of the good Arab family. Rather, the subject and predicates of
this claim – ‘the family’, ‘survival’, and ‘viability’ – constitute, in actual refugee
worlds, moving targets: powerful signifiers whose referents are often uncertain,
plural at any rate, and pervaded with complicated affects.
This simple observation allows one to flesh out, and to query perhaps, the alluring
claim that the inhabitants of refugee camps live in a perpetual ‘state of exception’
(after Agamben 1998). While defendable in the register of law, this claim becomes
deeply problematic, I believe, when it extends to describing refugee experience
and subjectivity in terms of ‘bare life’, a Hobbesian world hanging only by the
threads of basic biological dependencies and unbounded patriarchal authority. The
snapshots gathered here illustrate the multiple idioms, verbal and non-verbal, that
refugees deploy in the process of embodying far-reaching obligations towards rela-
tives. In doing so, they also evince specific modalities of, and concerted efforts for,
constituting the self as an ethical subject of one’s conduct towards relatives – even
where the carrying on of moral codes seems to hinge on dependencies incurred in
the struggle for survival. This labor of self-making in the deep recesses of intimate
relationships is, I believe, central for understanding the morality of everyday life
and the fabric of the future in a community whose political existence, and place in
the world, otherwise remains in indefinite abeyance.
Acknowledgments
Funding for fieldwork in Tyre was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science
Research Council. I am also grateful to Veena Das, Aaron Goodfellow, and Pamela
Reynolds for comments and suggestions on a previous version of this chapter (its
shortcomings are mine). My gratitude towards the inhabitants of Nahr al-Samir,
Jal al-Bahr, al-Bass, Rashidiyyeh, and Burj al-Shamali, who generously offered
me their hospitality and their friendship, knows no limits.
Notes
1 http://www.inash.org (accessed September 5, 2008).
2 The patrilineal character of the hamula has been questioned in more recent works, and
the hamula redefined as a ‘corporate patronymic group that was not genealogically
integrated’ but in which membership ‘was expressed in a patrilineal idiom’ (Atran 1986:
281).
3 To be fair, Rosenfeld’s later analyses in particular (e.g. 1968, 1976), like more recent
historical works (Miller 1985; Swedenburg 2003) give more attention to the role of the
state (British, and then Israeli) in ‘shoring up’, through the promotion of the heads of
hamulas, ‘a lineage power system that manipulates and maintains factions based on the
use of women whose daily and marital fates are under the control of fathers, uncles and
brothers just for this purpose’ (Rosenfeld 1968).
4 That is refugees originating from the villages of Sahel al-Hula (e.g. al-Zuq, al-Na’me,
al-Khalsa), a large, swampy plain in north-east Palestine. This origin is often ethnicized
in the discourse of other refugees, and the term ‘ghawarni’ endowed with derogatory
connotations. Camp residents attribute to ‘al-ghawarni’ such negative features as a dis-
tinct, non-Palestinian geographic origin (often located in Africa), distinct racial features
(darker skin), and despicable moral traits detectable for example in their alleged keenness
to let women work, ‘bil-buyut’, as housemaids. It is very likely that the specificities of
the environment of Sahel al-Hula entailed modes of production and of social organization
that set its inhabitants apart from the fellahin and city-dwellers of northern Galilee.
5 I have changed all names of persons and several names of the localities.
6 M: mother; B: brother; D: daughter; S: son; Z: sister; F: father. For example, ‘MBD
marriage’ means marriage of a male individual with his mother’s brother’s daughter.
7 ‘This is Palestinian, Palestinian, Palestinian food, this is folklore.’
8 I have developed elsewhere a more sustained exploration of this case (in French), see
Perdigon (2008).
11 ‘A world of movement’
Memory and reality for
Palestinian women in the camps
of Lebanon
Maria Holt
Introduction
In 2007, Um Saleh commemorated her sixtieth year in exile. Now 75 years old, she
was born in Lydda, now the site of Israel’s main airport. She remembers that it had
lemons, olives, figs and gooseberries. It also had schools and hospitals although,
she said, girls did not usually attend school. She stayed at home with her family
and did not learn to read or write. Um Saleh left Palestine when she was 14 years
old, without her parents; they went to Jordan and she never saw them again. She
was married in Lebanon and gave birth to five sons and five daughters. The family
lived in Tell al-Zaatar refugee camp in Beirut; in 1976, her husband and three of
her sons were killed during the siege and massacre that destroyed the camp. She
moved to Damour, then Raouche in Beirut and in 1986, after the camp wars, she
moved to the Gaza Building, a former hospital located in Sabra, an impoverished
neighbourhood of Lebanese and Palestinians, situated next to the Palestinian Shatila
refugee camp in Beirut.
The marking of 60 years of Palestinian exile was accompanied by mourning and
sorrow, especially in Lebanon where refugees expressed anger that their claims
for justice and dignity have still not been addressed and that violence against them
continues. In May 2007, battles between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants
inside the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp near Tripoli caused approximately 32,000
Palestinian refugees to flee from their homes in panic. By July, the camp had been
almost entirely destroyed and its inhabitants’ futures had become uncertain. This
incident reinforced for Palestinians the lack of safety that has characterized their
stay in Lebanon since 1948 and was highlighted by Um Saleh’s narrative. On this
occasion, as on many previous ones, the refugees realized they can have no sense
of permanent belonging or entitlement in Lebanon. Instead, the fate of present-day
refugees, like that of Um Saleh before them, is typical of those forced to flee their
homes and eke out an existence in an alien environment. Um Saleh remarked that
she still feels like a stranger in Lebanon. Palestinian refugees ‘very commonly recall
at least one incident where they were insulted . . . on the mere grounds of being a
refugee’ (al-Hout 2004: 23). The Lebanese government too, through discrimina-
tory practices, has made clear over the years its wish to be rid of the ‘Palestinian
refugee problem’.
‘A world of movement’ 181
Um Saleh’s story, and the bleak fact that, after 60 years, the refugee crisis has
still not been resolved, raises the question of identity and, in particular, how the
identity of Palestinians in Lebanon has been shaped by violence, insecurity and lack
of hope. How can a woman such as Um Saleh, whose grieving loss of homeland
and family members has caused profound sadness, reclaim an identity frozen in
time and space? In seeking to answer this question, I will analyse the problematic
of how the reality of homelessness and contested notions of diaspora circumscribe
the lives of refugee women. I will do this, first, by discussing gender identity and
the particular practices, experiences and processes of change that inform refugee
women’s lives; second, although the notion of a national, shared identity exerts a
powerful influence on all Palestinians, one could argue that it has been badly dam-
aged in recent years; finally, I will explore arguments about geographic identity, in
terms of the ‘world of movement’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 4), that the refugees
supposedly inhabit. By focusing on the ‘several overlapping senses of identity . . .
involved in the process of how Palestinians have come to define themselves as a
people’ (Khalidi 1997: 6), I will argue that the refugees are trapped in a conflict
between, on the one hand, pride in themselves as a national entity that has survived
numerous attempts to obliterate it. and, on the other hand, a constant sense of being
unwelcome. I will also argue that it is unrealistic and unjust to expect them to solve
this 60-year-old political crisis by themselves.
Methodology
The chapter is based on fieldwork I carried out in some of the Lebanese refugee
camps in 2006–7.1 The objective of my research was to evaluate Palestinian refugee
women’s identity in Lebanon today by examining a series of factors: a knowledge
and memory of where Palestinians come from; their history in Lebanon; the vio-
lence to which they have subjected; the changes that have taken place in women’s
lives, changes that have occurred in the wider world and have an effect on the
refugees; women’s relationships with the places where they live; and their hopes
and imaginings for the future. My research uncovered a wealth of details about life
in Palestine before 1948, the terrifying flight into exile and the early bewildering
and bitter years in Lebanon. It explored the wide range of experiences, both posi-
tive and negative, that women have had in their own lives and it invited women to
comment on sources of strength or empowerment, such as education, family life
and religion, and also the particular difficulties they have faced. By highlighting
the memories and experiences of refugee women, this chapter will consider how
Palestinians live in the world today: they are a nation in exile, waiting to return
to their homeland; a diasporic community scattered among the four corners of
the globe; a victimized population seeking justice for grievances suffered over 60
years; a resistance movement. How, I will ask, do these multiple ‘identities’ affect
the ways in which women behave and frame their stories? How are women using
the attributes of identity to influence their future?
The notion of ‘refugee women’ as a homogenized group raises a number of
complex methodological issues. Listening to Um Saleh’s story was a humbling
182 Maria Holt
experience and made me question my own positionality as a western researcher
and activist. I agree with Mohanty (2003) that we need to deconstruct terms such
as ‘power relations’, ‘oppression’ and ‘resistance’ in order to shed light on the
unique stories and overlapping experiences of individual ‘refugee women’. Rather
than thinking about revolutionary struggles as ‘possessing power versus being
powerless’ and women as ‘powerless, unified groups’, we need to examine ways
in which ‘third-world women’ are ‘constituted as women through . . . kinship,
legal and other structures’ (Mohanty 2003: 66–7). Post-colonial feminist theory
has encouraged western feminists ‘to think about who they are speaking for when
they speak of “woman” or “women”’ (Mills 1998: 99). Spivak argues that, if ‘the
subaltern has no history, and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more
deeply in shadow’ (Spivak 1993: 83), and therefore the western feminist theorist
must ‘unlearn female privilege’ (Spivak 1993: 91) in order to re-think her own
position ‘in relation to the subaltern’ (Mills 1998: 107). Thus, it is simplistic to
view ‘Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon’ as a ‘powerless, unified group’.
Instead, I must acknowledge my own position as an outsider and assess my claim
to ‘speak for’ Palestinian women. The sole ground on which this is acceptable is
as an act of solidarity in support of a group, Palestinian refugees, that has not been
able to make its voice heard.
While one can generalize to some extent about the refugees’ shared experiences
of harshness and injustice, it is often more instructive to focus on the particular
stories of individuals. Palestinian women regard themselves as rational subjects
who are aware that, by talking about their own life experiences to outsiders, they
are accessing a channel through which to ‘tell the world’ about the injustice done to
Palestinians (see Sayigh 2002: 321). Living as they do on the margins, Palestinian
refugees have ‘developed a particular way of seeing reality’ (hooks 1990: 341)
and it is not the task of the western researcher to twist that reality to ‘prove’ her
own arguments.
Meanings of identity and memory

Wollen (1994: 189) suggests that ‘there are two types of identity: one for those who
stay at home, and another for those who move around’. I would argue that there
should also be a third category of those who move around unwillingly. Palestinians
cannot forget that they were expelled from their homeland in 1948; they are equally
insistent on their right of return. As Nadia, the head of a women’s organization work-
ing in Ain el-Hilwe camp, said, ‘the Palestinian identity is of primary importance.
From birth, young people are taught that they are Palestinian and that Lebanon is
not their country’. Peteet likewise argues that Palestinian identities are embedded
in three sets of phenomena:
First, the refugees were from Palestine and nowhere else. Violent displacement
followed by the vigorous denial of a Palestinian national identity launched
the objectification of their identities . . . The second set was constituted by
the social and cultural crafting of place in the camps. Third, the militant
anticolonial political activities that unfolded in these places were productive
of identities.
(Peteet 2005: 99–100)
This raises the question of how memory and identity buttress each other. Identity, in
the words of Petersen and Rutherford (1995: 142), ‘is part of an infinite movement’.
For Palestinian refugees, it is also a way of articulating memory and I would argue
that notions of ‘infinite movement’ fail to address the core and real life experiences
of Palestinians in exile.
How then do perceptions of ‘identity’ vary between men and women? In the
scholarship on memory, as Chedgzoy notes, ‘masculinity is rarely subjected to
critical analysis’. Yet, she adds, ‘because memory is crucial to understanding one-
self as a social subject, gender is inevitably at the heart of its workings’ (2007:
216). My work with Palestinian camp women supports this argument. For many
women, work outside the home has become an economic necessity and yet some
experience resistance from their husbands. Salwa in Rashidiyyeh camp, for exam-
ple, told me how she had obtained a loan to open a dress shop but she had to get
her husband’s permission to go ahead. She stressed the psychological aspect; her
husband was satisfied because she was making a much-needed financial contri-
bution and this created a positive atmosphere in their home. Minh-ha (1994: 15)
argues that the consensus in patriarchal societies is that ‘streets and public places
belong to men’ and this is why some of the women I met spoke of being constrained
by their husband’s authority. Cockburn (1998: 11) has written about ‘coercive
identities’ that ‘hold us hostage’. Whose ‘identity’, therefore, are we speaking
about?
For Palestinians as a national collectivity, identity is associated with home-
lessness and injustice, but also with struggle. While women and men share these
fundamental facets of national identity, there is also an element of dissent. Many
women remarked that they see politics as being male-dominated and ‘useless’;
political leaders have failed to recover even an inch of Palestinian soil or to improve
the living conditions of refugee communities. They have also appropriated the
narrative of Palestine. How memory works, suggests Reading (2007: 220) – ‘who
looks back, who has the authority to look back, who is believed when they look
back, who is remembered as witnesses by those with authority, who is threatened
with being forgotten – is complex’. It is also highly significant when attempting
to retrieve and locate the lived experiences of women driven from their homeland.
Sangster (1998: 87) is correct when she suggests that traditional sources ‘have often
neglected the lives of women’ and this has sometimes resulted in assumptions about
a woman’s role and a tendency to disregard women’s voices as authoritative history-
tellers. Sayigh (2007: 138) has written about the exclusion of women’s narratives
from Palestinian national history, which, she argues, is ‘defined as knowledge
of events, from which experience, especially women’s experience, is rigorously
excluded’.
184 Maria Holt
Gender identity
Jamila, a 35-year-old mother of four children in Rashidiyyeh camp criticized the
popular committee that runs the camp. There was no electricity in the camp for ten
days, she said, the wires were cut and only generators were working. She added:
‘The popular committee does not play a role to improve the daily living conditions
of the camp; they only take care of themselves.’ Her words of criticism were echoed
by Siham, a young woman in Bourj el-Barajneh camp, who remarked that she is
not interested in politics; the leaders of the political parties are not doing anything
good and she does not want to get involved. There are not many women involved
in politics, she said, their priority is marriage and children. A number of women
I met were similarly negative. A human rights worker in Beirut pointed out that,
although the majority of those who participate in demonstrations are women, eve-
ryone notices that women are absent from, for example, popular committees and,
therefore, people see the importance of training programmes for women: ‘women
need skills and self-confidence; it is necessary to encourage women to participate’.
According to the Hamas representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, women have
an important role in Palestinian society; they are responsible for their families and
‘this can be very tough’. The words he uses here both confirm women’s traditional
place within the family and highlight the hardships they endure that cannot be
described as ‘traditional’, such as the Israeli occupation and the violence of living
as refugees in Lebanon. The role of protector of their families, which Hamdan
ascribes to women, encompasses a wide range of activities and has permitted
women to move well beyond the purely domestic sphere and assume an identity
of ‘resisters’. Their experiences suggest we need to find ‘a language of identity
which allows for difference and diversity’ (Kandiyoti 1993: 388).
When a girl is growing up in a refugee camp in Lebanon, she receives formal
and informal indications of her identity. At youth clubs and school, she learns
about Palestinian history and geography. She is taught about Palestinian customs
and traditions, such as songs, dances and food. From parents and grandparents, she
hears about her own village in Palestine and quickly understands the centrality of
return. Older people tell her about the injustice of being uprooted and forced from
their country but they also tell of the ways in which Palestinians have resisted. An
important period in the lives of many refugee women in Lebanon was between
1969 and 1982, when the Palestinian revolution flowered and ‘the call to mass
armed struggle encouraged women’s full participation in the Resistance movement’
(Sayigh 2002: 319). Their recollections embrace a wide range of activities, from
re-building and protecting the camps in the absence of men to fighting alongside
men in the PLO and recruiting other women to the cause (see Peteet 1991). During
this period, suggests Sayigh (2002: 320), ‘gender norms became an arena of con-
flict as women struggled with their families to join the Resistance or marry men
of their own choice’.
At the same time, as she grows up, the young woman learns what it means to
be female in a traditional society and the restrictions that this tends to impose. Um
Saleh, living in Palestine in the 1940s, was unschooled and this was regarded by the
majority of Palestinians at that time as normal, but today most girls take advantage of
educational opportunities, including university degrees, and women’s contributions,
as paid workers, have become increasingly important to the welfare of families. I was
interested to hear more about the conflict between rising expectations and notions
of a ‘woman’s place’ which spring, on the one hand, from traditional practices and,
on the other, from the disadvantaged status of Palestinians in Lebanon. How do
women make sense of these contradictions? Chatty and Hundt (2005: 178) argue
that, for girls, ‘movement within the family and in the community is circumscribed
. . . Girls tend to be burdened with household chores.’ Um Khalid, a mother of two
teenage children in Bourj el-Barajneh camp, elaborated on this view; she told me
that ‘there is discrimination against women; women are always criticized, and there
is different treatment of boys and girls’. But, she added, ‘we are trying to change
this; now women have a better role’. Aziza, a 44-year-old midwife in the same
camp agreed that ‘now women are more liberated; they are more educated; they
work in hospitals, schools and other places; it is not like the old generation’. Their
assessment of improvements in women’s lives was supported by Hanan, aged 23
and working for a non-governmental organization in the camp, who confirmed that
‘today’s young women are completely different from the older generation. When
the people came from Palestine, women were confined to the home and domestic
activities. Now women are stronger than before; men are changing too; attitudes
are changing’. But Zahra, an 18-year-old student, disagreed: ‘Girls do not have
their freedom’, she said. ‘There is discrimination against girls; this is traditional.
They are controlled by their parents and then, after marriage, the husband controls
the woman.’ Other women spoke positively of the protection given to women by
religion. Um Walid, a 45-year-old mother of seven children said that Islam gives a
woman all her rights but the problem is that people follow tradition rather than Islamic
principles. Her understanding echoed Zahra’s frustration with traditional modes
of behaviour. Speaking from her own experience, Um Muhammad, a 67-year-old
widow observed that a woman has many rights; if she is married, her husband is
obliged to treat her well; he should not beat her, he should support and respect her,
he should help her raise the children and should defend her.
Beyond the practical difficulties of being female in a relatively conservative
and claustrophobic environment, women must contend with certain mythologizing
elements. Slyomovics speaks of the equation of ‘wife’ and ‘house’; the image of
a woman, she suggests, ‘frequently a peasant woman, comes to embody the lost
Palestinian Arab house’ (1998: 199). This embodiment continues to affect women’s
self-image and emerged frequently in women’s narratives as they referred to the
traditions of the past, such as dress, marriage customs and food. But this portrayal
of the nation-as-woman, as others have observed, ‘depends for its representational
efficacy on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful, daughterly or maternal’
(Parker et al. 1992: 6), and one could argue that it places great burdens on refugee
women who are themselves caught between ‘being’ and ‘belonging’. There is a
tension between Um Muhammad’s account of how a husband should behave and
Salwa’s experiences with her own husband whose approval had to be sought before
the financial enterprise of opening a dress shop could go ahead.
186 Maria Holt
The woman’s identity is also rooted in familial responsibility. The majority of
the camp women, as Osama Hamdan observed, see their primary role as mothers,
homemakers and protectors of their children. For example, Um Rashid, a mother
of five, recalled the difficult times she experienced during the six-month siege
by the Lebanese Amal militia in the mid-1980s; their children were starving, she
said, so the women had to leave home to find food and then some of them were
wounded by snipers. During the civil war, she added, ‘women had a big role in
society’. However, the difficult conditions of the camps now make the traditional
role of protector difficult. Parents are concerned ‘by growing frustration and anger
in the camp – they listed problems such as lack of work and higher educational
opportunities, congested space, social deviance, demoralisation and poverty – espe-
cially insufficient educational and recreational services available to children and
youth’ (Serhan and Tabari 2005: 38). Khadija, who runs a women’s organization in
Bourj el-Barajneh camp, observed that violence within the camp is increasing; as
people live in small houses, there is nowhere for the children to play and therefore
they grow frustrated; children are becoming more violent towards each other and
sometimes take out their anger on their mothers. In addition, Sayigh suggests that
‘exile intensified some aspects of gender ideology, for example, the surveillance
of young women and violence against those who deviated from assigned gender
roles’ (2002: 319).
Women’s identity as mothers also contains mixed messages. While on the one
hand, as I have discussed, they feel a strong obligation to protect their children,
women are also celebrated in Palestinian society as the ‘mothers of martyrs’ and
the ones who give birth to more ‘children for the revolution’; these roles have
associations with death and sacrifice. During conversations with women in the
camps, I observed that, for most, the predominant instinct is to love and care for
their children. Many expressed anguish at the recollection of sons and daughters
killed during the conflict. Um Saleh, for example, lost three of her five sons in the
massacre of the Tell al-Zaatar refugee camp in 1976 and she continues, she said,
to live ‘in a sad situation’. There is also, for some, a sense that the sacrifice of their
children may have been in vain. They expressed anger that, while they have played
their part in producing children to continue the Palestinian struggle, their political
leadership has been unable to deliver a satisfactory resolution of the conflict or
even to provide hope.
National identity
Bowman argues that ‘much of the initial process of constructing a sense of one’s
identity lies in the activity of rejecting the appropriateness of definitions others
attempt to impose’ (1993: 75). Swedenburg, too, speaks of Palestinians attempt-
ing ‘to construct an “authentic” identity for themselves’ (1991: 153–4). Identity is
located in membership of a community and of a national entity. It is also linked to
some notion of ‘place’ and, as such, it may have different implications for men and
women. One could argue that women and men experience ‘place’ in different ways,
that their relationships with places vary. Camp women’s recollections tended to focus
on home, the rituals and familiarity of everyday life, what Slyomovics refers to as
‘gendering memory of place’ (1998: xx). Although, for ‘many people, displaced
and exiled from their homelands, places have long since ceased to provide straight-
forward support to their identity’ (Carter et al. 1993: vii), the place where a woman
raises her children, still remains central to her sense of self. There are two aspects
to consider here: first, the practical necessity of creating a tolerable environment
in which to enact family life; and second, a broader, more abstract notion of com-
munity: although the Palestinians are rootless and adrift in ‘a world of movement’,
they possess a strong shared feeling of belonging to one nation, which will one
day be translated into a real home of their own. According to Layla, a 38-year-old
married woman in Bourj el-Barajneh camp, wherever they are, Palestinians belong
to one identity; they are Palestinian. Many others echoed this sentiment.
The nakba of 1948 shattered the physical community of Palestinians. This event
was of such profound significance that it continues to inform Palestinians’ identifica-
tion with place in the present period. My research revealed a wealth of information
about how women coped with the catastrophic move from Palestine. In their stories,
women included many small details of everyday life. For example, Um Iyad, a
77-year-old woman who was born and married in Kabri, northern Palestine recalled
that one night there was a wedding, they were dancing dabkeh; a man came and
told them that massacres were being committed against Palestinian villages. He
said that the Jews were coming, so they stopped dancing to prepare themselves.
‘The Jews had military equipment’, she said, ‘while the Palestinians had nothing’.
Um Hisham described how her family were driven out of their village; they left
at night, running and walking for 24 hours until they reached the town of Bint
Jbeil in southern Lebanon. These stories, I think, exemplify some of the ways that
women ‘remember the past in different ways in comparison with men’ (Sangster
1998: 89). Beyond the suffering implicit in the women’s stories, an extraordinary
resilience emerges. Although some women found their memories too painful to
recount, most were willing to re-live the journeys they have made, in a ‘gendering
of the past’ that encapsulated laughter and sometimes tears.
However, despite claims of a ‘levelling of status and identities in the refugee
camps’ (Peteet 1995: 168), there are significant differences between Palestinian
communities. Um Saleh in Sabra, who had recently visited her daughter in Jordan,
pointed out that, in Jordan, Palestinians are treated better than they are in Lebanon;
they are given Jordanian nationality, allowed to own their own houses and receive
treatment in the hospitals. Um Selim in the same building agreed that, outside
Lebanon, Palestinians are much better off; they live ‘like kings and queens’, she
said. Even within Lebanon, individuals remark on differences between the camps
and the inhabitants’ ways of behaving. For example, some of the women displaced
to Beirut from the Nahr el-Bared camp in 2007 spoke about feeling ‘different’ from
people in Bourj el-Barajneh. Rasha a 34-year-old woman, who had lived in Nahr
el-Bared since 1986, remarked that she and her family ‘feel shocked’ by the way
people behave and dress in Bourj el-Barajneh; she feels, she said, ‘like a stranger. It
is completely different from life in Nahr el-Bared where people still follow village
ideas; they are not modern and do not accept new customs’.
188 Maria Holt
For the refugees, all that remains of pre-1948 Palestine is ‘a country woven from
memories, from songs, from stories of elders, from pictures, from old coins and
stamps, from dreams that refuse to come to terms with an unfair reality’ (Kanafani
1995: 40). My own research delved into the period of the nakba in terms of women’s
memories of places and local customs. Most of the elderly women I interviewed
remembered village life in Palestine as a simpler, more trusting time. For example,
Um Wissam, a woman who left Palestine when she was a child said that people
had good hearts, they cared about each other; neighbours helped each other. Um
Daoud, aged 73 and born in Acre, said that it was ‘like living in heaven’, a won-
derful life. One could argue, of course, that these references to a ‘golden age’ are
unrealistically rosy, but that would be to miss the essence of what these refugee
women are actually saying. They are making an important comparison between an
authentic life in a place where one belongs and feels ‘at home’ and a life of artifice
and discomfort in an alien and inhospitable environment. It is not that women’s
memories are inaccurate but rather they are a way of expressing a feeling of strong
contrasts. They are also, as I said before, a method of articulating communal claims
for justice.
Peteet argues that ‘[r]esistance to exile . . . and resistance to the legal designa-
tion “refugees” are central motifs of Palestinian exile culture’ (1995: 171) and this
awareness of their status as ‘refugees’ and the resistance it engenders came across
to me strongly during conversations with women of all ages. Khadija in Ain el-
Hilwe camp said that it is not enough for Palestinians to remember their country;
when a person feels he is a refugee, he has no dignity; thus Palestinians feel dif-
ferent from others because they are refugees. The sense of despair and humiliation
at their status as ‘refugees’ was repeated to me over and over again. Um Tariq, a
52-year-old woman with six children, for example, declared that being a refugee
means that ‘something is missing’, and Um Hisham, who was born in Palestine
and is now in her seventies, said she has a hatred of the word ‘refugee’. In the
future, she believes their land will be liberated and they can return; then they will
no longer be called ‘refugees’.
There is a tension between a victimized or disempowered identity and an identity
rooted in heroic struggle. Without a national liberation movement, ‘Palestinians’
sense of identity and spirit of resistance would be much impoverished and they
would have difficulty imagining a future’ (Swedenburg 1991: 171–2). The image
of Palestine and the process of imagining return provide a motivation for many
refugee women. For Randa, a 45-year-old woman born and raised in Bourj el-
Barajneh camp, to live in Palestine would mean security and safety. It would be
relaxing, even if she had to live under a tree; she would feel her existence had
meaning; like other women, she stressed the importance of belonging. Um Marwan,
a 58-year-old widow in the same camp, originally from Safsaf village, remarked
that, when they lived in Palestine, ‘people were free, whereas in Lebanon they are
living as refugees’. In conversations with camp women, I was constantly reminded
of what has been lost. This aching sense of place often creates a somewhat roman-
ticized image of Palestine. Women speak of an abundance of fruit and vegetables,
of beautiful landscapes and, as Randa said, of a ‘meaningful existence’. I think
their nostalgia has two purposes. On the one hand, it evokes meaningful existence
in stark contrast to the hopelessness and impoverishment of their present lives.
Um Saleh remarked that, in Palestine, she has a country but, in Lebanon, she has
nothing; if she lived in Palestine, she added, she would have her own house and
everyone would be together. On the other hand, it asserts a continuing claim to the
Palestinian homeland.
Exile, borders and diasporas

Although, as Said writes, exile is ‘the unhealable rift forced . . . between the self
and its true home’ (1990: 357), it has also been described as ‘a form of dissidence’
(Kristeva 1986: 296). In this section, I want to look more closely at the relationship
between the Palestinian homeland and what the Palestinian people have become
today: a dissident nation. Brah argues that ‘it is not possible to address the concept
of diaspora without considering its relationship to the idea of borders’. She defines
‘borders’ as ‘arbitrary dividing lines that are simultaneously social, cultural and
psychic’ and suggests that each border ‘embodies a unique narrative’ (2003: 625).
But, as Khalidi says, borders ‘are a problem for Palestinians since their identity
– which is constantly reinforced in myriad positive and negative ways – not only
is subject to question by the powers that be, but also is in many contexts suspect
almost by definition’ (1997: 2). For Palestinians, borders exist on several levels.
They can be found in the heavily fortified frontiers constructed by Israel to prevent
Palestinians from returning to their homeland; in the margins of camps that sepa-
rate refugees from the host society; and in claustrophobic rhetoric that reduces the
Palestinian struggle to the level of terrorism or irrelevance.
For Palestinians in exile, ‘part of the process of crossing physical and metaphysical
boundaries . . . is an investment in an idealized perception of the society of origin or
homeland’ (Buijs 1993: 3). This ‘idealized perception’ has been passed down through
generations and is reproduced by the daughters and granddaughters of those who
fled. For example, a group of teenage girls in Qasmiyye camp in southern Lebanon
spoke to me in 2007 about the places from which their grandparents came. Their
narratives are couched in similar language to that of the older generation. Dalal,
aged 18, said: ‘People lived together and loved each other as neighbours’, echoing
Um Wissam’s words; and for Aisha, aged 13, and Rouhaina, aged 15, as for Um
Daoud, Palestine is ‘paradise’, the ‘most beautiful country in the world’. But these
young girls also expressed appreciation of the place where they live. The camp, as
Farah (2006: 243) observes, ‘became a space upon which the inhabitants mapped
out a Palestinian identity’; in Rouhaina’s words, the camp is ‘a sweet place . . . it
has trees and spaces’. The people of Nahr el-Bared too, unexpectedly driven out of
their homes in May 2007, spoke about their desire to return but, this time, they were
not speaking of return to Palestine but to their destroyed camp. In Rasha’s words,
‘we had a lovely life, we lived peacefully’. The camp, for her, is equated with the
homeland; ‘we forgot Palestine’, she said, ‘because we were living happily, we had
land’. This is what Brah (2003: 614–15) describes as a ‘homing desire’ which, she
argues, ‘is not the same thing as desire for a “homeland”.’
190 Maria Holt
As a result of their ‘forced dispersal and reluctant scattering’ (Gilroy 1994: 207),
Palestinians became a diasporic community. There is an abundant literature on
questions of ‘diaspora’, but how accurately does this term represent Palestinians in
exile? Diaspora, defined as ‘a non-essentialist identity or culture, which is “hybrid,”
made up of different “crossings” and difficult to “locate” in terms of territorial
alignments’ (Anderson 2007: 272) is a way of conceptualizing the Palestinian
nation, dispersed around the world; it represents a desire ‘to move away from the
mythology of uniqueness’ (Hanafi 2005: 118). Cohen (1999: 272) characterizes
Palestinians as a ‘victim diaspora’, caused by the formation of the state of Israel,
but argues that, for ‘all victim diasporas, their experiences in modern nation-states
have been enriching and creative as well as enervating and fearful’. hooks (1990:
341) has written of ‘marginality’ as a ‘site of deprivation’ but, she argues, ‘it is
also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance’. For Harik (1986: 316),
while Palestinians are a diaspora ‘in that they are a population that lives outside the
bounds of its ancestral home’, they fit more accurately into the category of ‘non-state
actors’ aiming to become a nation-state. They are a scattered tribe ‘whose identity
can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all
costs return’ (Hall 1994: 401–2).
I agree with Cohen that Palestinians are a ‘victim diaspora’. They are also a reluc-
tant diaspora aiming, as Harik says, to become a nation-state or a nation seeking to
re-assemble itself as a territorialized entity. Rapport and Dawson (1998: 4) are correct
too when they argue that there must be new ways of conceptualizing identity in the
modern world; they suggest that a ‘world of movement’ can be understood ‘in terms
of actual physical motion around the globe and also as an imagination’. In this sense,
diasporic identity for Palestinians springs from a tension between their experiences
in the ‘world of movement’ as being ‘enriching and creative’ and their yearning to
become a nation-state, to be settled and, above all, to claim their rights.
There are also gender differences involved in membership of the diaspora and
these are associated with mobility and restriction. Some young men living in the
camps speak of emigrating elsewhere, to improve their lives and prospects; the
desire to emigrate ‘is seen as a method by which children protect themselves
against their reality and as a possible way out’ (Serhan and Tabari 2005: 41), but
young women feel they have fewer options. Um Samir in Rashidiyyeh camp said
that young people are always thinking about leaving because they have no oppor-
tunity to get married or build a house and, even if they are educated, they have no
chance of finding work.
Optimistic assessments of transnational populations and ‘a world of movement’
fail to do justice to the Palestinian ‘diaspora’. While it is certainly the case that the
Palestinian community contains numerous individuals who move around and feel
themselves to be citizens of the world, most of the refugee women I met in Lebanon
bemoan the fact of being stuck. Even if they have relatives in other countries, some
are not able to move far beyond the perimeters of the camp. They are constrained
by poverty and legal structures. Moreover, most have no wish to be part of a ‘world
of movement’; their most frequently expressed desire is to return to the villages of
their ancestors and to live like ‘normal’ people.
Conclusion
Based on the findings of my research, I would like to offer three conclusions. First,
the narratives of refugee women exhibit extraordinary resilience. The memories of
elderly survivors of the nakba provide important insights into the trauma of flight
in 1948 and the early difficult years of exile. They enrich male-dominated history-
telling with ‘a female tradition’ (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 233). They are related in
spellbinding and often humorous detail and have become the basis of a communal
narrative of survival. Women have passed on to their children both memories of a
different life and society in their homeland and the determination to survive difficult
conditions and the injustices of exile. The moral strength of these women encour-
aged the next generation to take a more proactive approach towards the liberation
of the homeland, and here too women played a key role.
Second, the activities of women have had an impact on the character of Palestinian
national identity. Appadurai (1996: 145) points out that ‘imagination and agency are
far more vital to group mobilization than we had hitherto imagined’. In their search
for an ‘authentic’ identity and in an effort to raise and protect their children, women
have contributed qualities of steadfastness and the ability to cope with adverse
and frequently violent conditions. The lives of Palestinians in Lebanon provide a
model of how a community forced into exile, subjected to unremitting violence
and consistently delegitimized by the international community can use the limited
means at its disposal to forge a revolutionary movement that was able to restore
national pride to Palestinians in exile, create the beginnings of a Palestinian state (in
terms of cultural, political and economic institutions), and mobilize some women
to play a significant role in the resistance movement; in other words, to create ‘a
site of resistance’. Although the Palestinian national movement in Lebanon was
destroyed by the Israeli invasion of 1982 and hopes for the successful resolution
of the problem of Palestinians in Lebanon were dashed by the 1993 Oslo Accords,
the model of resistance and survival continues to influence the exile community,
including women.
My third conclusion focuses on the need for real change. The voices of Palestinian
refugee women in Lebanon contribute towards a rich tapestry of experience. From
the elderly women with their memories of a long-lost homeland to the teenage girls
who demand a more tolerant future, one gets little sense of passive acceptance of
their fate. But it is not only narratives and memories but also real and concrete
actions that can make women’s lives more bearable and I would like to offer sev-
eral suggestions. To begin with, despite the refugees’ lack of faith in the Lebanese
government, it claims to be making moves to improve Palestinian living conditions
and this should be encouraged, especially by the international community. Next,
also to be encouraged is the growth of programmes for women to educate them
about their rights and to provide them with new skills. Third, the refugees, their
representatives and their supporters must continue to place pressure on their own
national governments to prevent the ‘refugee issue’ from being excluded from the
Palestinian–Israeli peace process or to be treated solely as a humanitarian concern.
Finally, processes of dignity should not be neglected, for example programmes and
192 Maria Holt
provisions for the elderly, the construction of play areas for children and the right
and ability to improve housing and living conditions within the camps.
I want to return, in conclusion, to the voices of the women and girls who are the
subjects of this chapter. Speaking to me in 2007, Amina, a survivor of the 1982
Sabra and Shatila massacre, said: ‘We still hope to return . . . this lives in our hearts
every day’. Um Mounif in Bourj el-Barajneh camp, whose son was killed during the
Amal sieges of the 1980s, said that she imagines life in Palestine would be like her
parents’ life in the past; she would like to return to her own village. Aisha, aged 13
and living in Qasmiyye camp, remarked that she would like to go back to Palestine
‘because it is my country’. To find a solution that includes these women and the
many others who contributed their stories to my research, the various components
of the international community must learn how to heed their voices.
Note
1 The project was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. During five
periods of fieldwork in Lebanon during 2006–7, covering nine weeks, I interviewed a
total of 65 women in Bourj el-Barajneh and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, the Gaza
Building in Beirut and Rashidiyyeh, Ain el-Hilweh and Qasmiyye camps in the south,
ranging in age from 13 to over 80. The material collected has been augmented by
fieldwork carried out in 2003. The interviews were conducted in Arabic and translated
into English by a local translator. The names of all women interviewed for this chapter
have been disguised.
12 Politics, patronage and
Popular Committees in
the Shatila refugee camp,
Lebanon
Manal Kortam
Introduction
Since their forced exile from Palestine 62 years ago, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon
have remained among the most disadvantaged when compared to Palestinian refu-
gees dwelling in other Arab host countries. While the whole Palestinian community
in Lebanon is under official legal discrimination, the situation of the individual
Palestinian depends on whether one is a camp dweller or not. The situation for camp
dwellers is particularly harsh, constituting what Sari Hanafi has termed a ‘closed
space’ that reinforces the segregation of the community (Hanafi 2008b).
Of all countries hosting the refugees, Lebanon has the highest rate of Palestinian
camp dwellers (51 per cent). In Syria, the percentage of camp-based refugees
decreases by almost half (27 per cent) and in Jordan only 16 per cent of the refugees
remain in camps. These numbers are an indicator of the harsh economic situation
facing Palestinians in Lebanon. The camps have been depicted by many authors as
a populated urban setting rife with poverty and environmental problems.
The Palestinian camps in Lebanon constitute a very complex space where differ-
ent actors intervene. Although some actors limit their intervention to humanitarian
services or development in the camps (such as the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and many non-
governmental organizations (NGOs)), some others have assigned themselves as
legal spokesmen of the Palestinian refugees and have imposed their authority (politi-
cal factions, Popular Committees). Yet none of them guarantees protection for the
Palestinians in the camps. Such a situation creates a climate of insecurity within
the Palestinian communities in the camps; marginalized by the host country and by
the peace process, they feel abandoned by their local leadership, which is unable
to agree on a proper mode of governance to improve their situation.
The camps came under the authority of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) after the Cairo Agreement of 1969. But the evacuation of the PLO’s mili-
tary forces in 1982 after the Israeli invasion and the subsequent decline of its
power in Lebanon have had negative consequences for the living conditions of
the Palestinians in Lebanon, particularly the camp dwellers. Indeed, after 1982
the camps became an arena for the formation of a web of complex power struc-
tures composed of two Popular Committees (one formed by pro-Syrian factions
194 Manal Kortam
and another by PLO members), political factions (pro- and anti-PLO), Islamist
Palestinian and non-Palestinian groups, imams, NGOs and UNRWA. The capacity
of these actors to play a major role in camp governance depends on the balance of
power between them.
In this chapter I consider the Palestinian camps as ‘political systems’, within
which different dynamics and modes of interaction subsist. I analyse the capabil-
ity of various political actors (Popular Committees, political factions) in ‘treating’
the emerging needs of the refugee community. This article focuses on Shatila, a
run-down Palestinian refugee camp located in Beirut. The choice of this camp as
a case study is due to its unique history of self-governance: a committee elected
by the residents to improve their lives in the camp was in the end defeated by the
camp’s ruling ‘Popular Committee’, which includes unelected representatives from
different Palestinian political factions. Those two entities are considered mediators
between the Palestinian public on one side and the PLO representatives in Lebanon
and the Lebanese authorities on the other. The research in this chapter is based
on interviews with the Shatila camp’s main actors (NGOs, committees, political
factions) and other individuals carried out during work for my Master’s thesis in
winter 2006. And later on, in winter 2008, more interviews were conducted for the
purpose of developing this article. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the
Palestinian refugees exiled to Lebanon since 1948 and the history of Shatila camp.
Then I present the living conditions in the camp, before delving into the governance
of the camp and the process of forming an elected committee that could solve the
many social problems in the camp.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon: a brief history

The Palestinian tragedy started directly after the vote for Resolution 181 by the
General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) on 29 November 1947. Palestinians
rejected the UN Partition Plan to divide their homeland into separate Jewish and
Palestinian states, but in 1948 the establishment of the state of Israel was unilaterally
declared. In the ensuing battles, Israeli troops planned and carried out the system-
atic expulsion of the Palestinians (Morris 1986). The ethnic cleansing exercised
by the Israeli Army and its precursors forced around 750,000 Palestinians to flee
their homeland; approximately 100,000 of them were driven northwards across the
Lebanese border (Khalidi 2001).
Lebanon’s primary impact on the refugees was to separate them by sect and class.
Middle-class urban Palestinians settled freely in Lebanese cities and encountered
few difficulties in obtaining employment and after that being granted Lebanese
nationality. This route was barred to the mass of poor, rural refugees who were
subject to economic exploitation and who remained in mainly Muslim agricultural
or urban areas, where they provided seasonal agricultural labour and constituted a
cheap labour pool for public and private construction (Sayigh 1994: 23).
The areas designated by the host country for Palestinian settlement became the
official recognized refugee camps. During the first two decades of exile (1948–67)
conditions in the camps were harsh. Palestinians were in dire poverty and dependent
Politics, patronage and Popular Committees 195
on relief services provided by UNRWA, which was created in 1950 to provide
humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian refugees. The 1969 Cairo Agreement
marked a new era in the Palestinians’ history in Lebanon after a year-long series
of battles with the Lebanese Army. The agreement ‘liberated’ the camps from
the oppression of the Lebanese Military Intelligence (the Deuxieme Bureau) and
allowed the PLO to govern the camps. A new order, which will be discussed later
on in this article, was set up in the camps under PLO control. In the following
decade (1967–75) the situation for the Palestinians in Lebanon improved, but liv-
ing conditions remained harsh, as a majority of homes still had no running water
by 1971 and fully half had no sanitation and sewage by 1980. Increasingly, the
Palestinians came to be employed by various PLO institutions (hospitals, factories,
social centres and armed groups).
Shatila camp: a brief overview

Based on oral testimonies, Rosemary Sayigh’s work (1994) traces the early history
of Shatila camp. According to her, it was founded by a mujahidin leader (qa’id),
Abed Bisher (also known as Abou Kamal), who was in Lebanon on an arms-buying
mission for the Mufti of Jerusalem on 15 May 1948 when the Israelis closed the
border. Hoping to find a space in which to gather together the people of his village,
Majd al-Kroom, Bisher went to see someone called al-Basha Shatila, who gave
him permission to use a plot of land. The donated land was not much bigger than
a field, a narrow oblong strip about 200 by 400 metres. Then Bisher managed to
procure 20 tents from UNRWA, and went to all the places where Majd al-Kroom
villagers were scattered and brought them, as well as relatives, friends and associ-
ates from other nearby villages, to Beirut. He wanted Shatila to grow as rapidly
possible, aware that the larger its population grew, the harder it would be to evict
people. Bisher kept in continuous contact with UNRWA in order to procure the
things that the refugees needed – distribution of milk and rations, tents and so on.
In early 1950 there were around 20 families; a few months later the number had
grown to 60. By the early 1960s there are said to have been 3,000 people in and
around the camp. Although more than half of Shatila’s original population was from
Majd al-Kroom, some 25 other villages in north-western Galilee were represented
(Sayigh 1994: 35–7).
In June 1982 Israel launched a second invasion of Lebanon, which was far larger
than the first one in 1978. The camps and Palestinian Revolutionary Movement
(PRM) locales were particularly targeted by the Israeli forces and the level of dev-
astation was high, leading to the departure of the PLO from Lebanon. There was a
negotiated settlement whereby the PLO agreed to withdraw from Lebanon in return
for US guarantees for the safety of ‘law-abiding Palestinian non-combatants left
behind in Beirut’. After the PLO evacuation, however, the Israeli Army encircled
the camps of Beirut and unleashed its allied right-wing Lebanese militia forces on
Shatila and the adjacent neighbourhood of Sabra, resulting in the wholesale mas-
sacre of at least 1,500 civilians (Khalidi 2001). Inhabitants began to return within
days, clearing the rubble and patching up their homes. There was a double urgency
196 Manal Kortam
to the rebuilding: not only was winter approaching, but the Lebanese Army was
back in charge of the Beirut camps; everyone expected that building restrictions
would soon be reimposed (Sayigh 1994).
At first sight, the Israelis’ apocalyptic invasion of Lebanon during the summer
of 1982 appeared to have created a radical shift in the Lebanese and regional bal-
ance of forces. Later on, Syria’s policy towards the Palestinians in Lebanon was
primarily determined by its policy towards Lebanon as a whole, and concurrently
by its drive to control the PLO, in line with Syrian regional strategies and objec-
tives. In February 1984, Lebanese Shi’ite Amal militiamen took over army positions
around the camps and on 19 May 1985, battles between them and Palestinian forces
began. Shatila was under its first siege until 23 June 1985. The second siege came
one year later; it lasted from 29 May until 27 June 1986. The third and last siege
from November 1986 to April 1987 was harder and made complicated by severe
internal tensions and splits within the camp (Sayigh 1994). These two years are
known in Palestinian history as ‘the War of the Camps’,1 which was also waged
in Borj el-Barajneh camp in Beirut and in the camps of the south. Amal did not
manage to take control of any camps, but intensive bombardment led to the total
obliteration of Sabra and the destruction of 80 per cent of homes in Shatila and of
50 per cent of homes in Borj el-Barajneh. Hospitals, schools and other facilities
were destroyed in the fighting (Khalidi 2001). In all, approximately 2,500 people
were killed, some of them because of lack of medical attention, as a result of the
interminable Amal sieges of the camps.
After the end of the war in 1987, a Syrian force took over Amal’s positions around
the Beirut camps, controlling entry and exit. They prohibited the free movement
out of or in to the camps and the entry of building materials. These prohibitions
remained in force for more than a year, turning Shatila into a prison of rubble. Yet
the Syrians did not give protection. On more than one occasion, Amal militiamen
sprayed bullets at men standing near the camp’s entrance (Sayigh 1994: 329).
Violent Palestinian infighting erupted sporadically in the period following the
War of the Camps, most notably in Beirut camps in May 1988 between Arafat
loyalists and dissidents, which resulted in the victory of the Syrian-backed dissi-
dents (Khalidi 2001). After their victory, Syrian-backed factions such as Sa’iqa (a
Palestinian branch of the Syrian al-Baath party created in 1966), Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) (a breakaway faction
from PFLP in 1969) and Fatah Intifadah (split from Fatah in 1983)2 took over the
governance of the Palestinian camps and formed their own Popular and Security
Committees.
Changes in camp social fabric

From the 1950s, many waves of migration led to the demographic explosion of the
camps’ area. These population transfers resulted from several factors and turning
points in Lebanese and Palestinian history: the eradication of three Palestinian
camps during the civil war (Tall al-Za’tar, Jisr el-Basha, Quarantine); the pull of
Beirut’s construction boom in the 1990s; the push of low wages and landlessness
in the rural hinterland; and war in the south. This influx would radically change
the character of the camps’ area, encouraging the growth of commerce and serv-
ice institutions as well as low-cost urban housing (Sayigh 1994: 37–8). Later on,
Shatila became a shanty town attracting migrant workers (Sudanese, Syrians and
Kurds). Of course, the camp also shed its population through emigration, starting
after the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 and peaking after the end of the War
of the Camps in 1987. Many migrated to Scandinavian countries and to Germany.
Others moved to an unofficial camp, ‘Wadi el Zine’, on the edge of the southern
Lebanese town Sidon.
All these ‘in-and-out’ waves resulted in changes in the social fabric of the camps.
Today, some 50 per cent of Shatila’s 16,000 residents are not Palestinian, while
a quarter of the Palestinian residents are relative newcomers to the camp. Of the
non-Palestinians, two-thirds are Lebanese while the other third are of various other
nationalities (Sudanese, Sri Lankan, Syrian, etc.).
Living conditions: from bad to worse

After the War of the Camps, Shatila was a makeshift camp. There was neither con-
trol over nor planning for the construction process. Shatila was overcrowded: its
houses were smaller and more crowded than in other camps and its streets narrower
(Sayigh 1994). Because the camp area cannot be enlarged, the residents need to
find alternative ways of fitting more people into the already cramped space. Their
remaining option is to add additional stories to existing houses, although building
regulations prohibit this (Knudsen 2005b).
The extreme population density of Shatila is immediately apparent to any visi-
tor. About 8,532 refugees live in an area of less than 40,000 square metres that
forms an especially dense part of the camp. In the Shatila camp, there are only two
main roads, neither of which is wide enough to allow for two small cars to pass
each other. Most ‘streets’ are no wider than a corridor and do not allow for two
people to walk side-by-side. Many houses are dilapidated and even structurally
unsafe; overcrowded, with several persons living and sleeping in one room; and
unhygienic and lacking proper water and ventilation. Infrastructure systems have,
from the beginning, only been designed for the short or medium term. According
to the Palestinian Association for Human Rights (Shahed), water and electricity
services are scarce in the camp. Some people, however, profit from transforming
these basic services into private businesses (Shahed 2005).
Environmental health conditions are extremely bad, with damp, overcrowded
shelters and open drains. The sewerage system needs considerable expansion while
the camp’s residents drink contaminated, unsafe water supplied through a poor dis-
tribution network provided by the Beirut Municipality or through four public water
wells. The overloaded sewerage of the water network has led to the contamination
of water, which causes a range of environmental and health problems.
Most of the men in Shatila camp work as labourers or run grocery stores and
other small enterprises (hairdressers, pharmacies, restaurants, etc.). Shatila’s inhab-
itants experience the same economic conditions as Palestinians in other camps.
198 Manal Kortam
The rate of unemployment among Palestinians is very high, 60 per cent according
to Richard Cook.3 The main employment opportunities for Palestinians are with
UNRWA, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society or Palestinian political organiza-
tions. Work with NGOs is not permanent for the Palestinian employees; some are
employed on projects or on yearly contract. The agricultural and construction sec-
tors provide employment on a temporary basis. Lebanese enterprises could, but do
not, offer job opportunities to Palestinians, who usually are either unemployed or
underemployment (Hanafi and Tiltnes 2008). No job security is offered with any
kind of employment. The vast majority of Palestinians depend on remittances for
their living and on UNRWA aid, as pointed out by the Commissioner-General of
UNRWA in her report on 26 September 2005:
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are among the most disadvantaged in the

region. They have limited access to government services or the labor market,
and they have to depend almost entirely on the agency [UNRWA] for basic
services. Unemployment among refugees is high and living conditions poor.
Comparing this report with her most recent, in July 2008 (covering the period from
1 January to 31 December 2007), she added that:
[I]n June 2005, the Ministry of Labour of Lebanon allowed registered Palestine
refugees born in Lebanon to work at manual and clerical jobs and to obtain
work permits, both of which were previously denied. Palestine refugees were
still effectively prohibited from practicing several professions, including medi-
cine, law, journalism and engineering. Unemployment among refugees was
high and living conditions poor . . . Palestine refugees have limited access
to government services and have to depend almost entirely on the Agency
for basic services. Legislation preventing Palestine refugees from buying
immovable property remained in force.
Palestinians in Shatila share roughly the same poor health and educational condi-
tions as those of other camp-dwelling Palestinians in Lebanon. These conditions
are especially harsh for the more vulnerable residents. Education levels among
Palestinians are in constant decline,4 something that is worrying for the future of
the Palestinians. Many factors are behind this situation; teachers use basic tradi-
tional methods and schools have double shifts. Palestinians in Lebanon stand out
as having the lowest levels of educational achievement compared to Palestinians
in other areas and compared to Lebanese schools. In terms of human capital, there
is high illiteracy relative to the national population and refugees in other areas
(Delage 2008: 12).5
Health conditions are the main concern for the Palestinian refugees. They are
denied access to the Lebanese health insurance system and to Lebanese public
hospitals unless the facility has a contract with UNRWA. The level of psychologi-
cal distress is considerably higher among Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon
than in other countries and access to health services is only getting more difficult.
Palestinian communities are currently registering an increasing level of violence,
which is a cause-and-effect relationship (Delage 2008: 13).
In the Shatila camp there are two elementary schools run by UNRWA; one
UNRWA health centre with an average of 79 patients per day; and a dental care
clinic. Another NGO clinic is near the camp, and it provides maternal and child
care. In addition, a number of NGOs are active in Shatila, including Al-Najda, Beit
Atfal Al-Soumoud, Norwegian Peoples’ Aid, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society
and the Children and Youth Centre. The services they provide include health clinics,
cash assistance, summer activities, kindergartens and rehabilitation centres. The
prospect of future decent employment would improve secondary problems such as
school dropout, male student underperformance in the earlier stages of education,
drugs and violence (Delage 2008: 12).
The PLO’s resources were limited after the Organization evacuated in 1982 and
the resultant closure of social institutions that used to provide work opportunities
and social services for Palestinians. These limited services were further reduced
after the launching of the peace process in 1991, when funds were channelled to sup-
port the new Palestinian National Authority. UNRWA depends on states’ donations,
and its services are steadily shrinking. Yet, the major problem in the deterioration
of Palestinians’ situation in Lebanon is the discriminatory politics imposed by
the Lebanese state aimed at excluding the Palestinians from the economic, social
and civic life of Lebanon. In that sense, Lebanon does not grant Palestinians any
rights, either as residents or as ‘foreigners’. The refugees do not correspond to
any jurisdiction set by Lebanese law. Their legal status is characterized by a legal
void. The Lebanese state has eradicated their legal status and produced entities
that can be neither named nor classified by law. Lebanon has replaced the military
siege by a political siege, constituting what Agamben called a ‘state of exception’
(Agamben 2005). In such a situation the vast majority of Palestinians in Lebanon
are pushed into being completely dependent on their local service providers (politi-
cal factions, Popular Committees, NGOs). In the next section I therefore analyse
as a case study the mode of intervention of those actors in alleviating the ‘siege’
of Shatila camp.
Governing Shatila camp

The Cairo Agreement of 1969 gave the PLO the authority to govern the camps
in Lebanon in order to ‘liberate’ the population of the camps from the oppression
that was exercised by the Lebanese Military Intelligence. The PLO proceeded by
establishing two institutions as responsible for the governance in the camp. First,
the Palestinian Armed Struggle Command (qiyadat al kifah al mussalah) served as
a local police in the camps. It had the task of ensuring public order and the power
to detain offenders. It is regarded as the executive power of the Popular Committee.
Second, Popular Committees (al lijan al sha’abiya) operated as a municipality, with
responsibility for maintaining services such as electricity, water, garbage collection
and the handling of small disputes by arranging mediation and reconciliation (sul-
hah). The committees included representatives of each political group in the national
200 Manal Kortam
movement, representatives from the popular organizations such as the women’s
union, independents6 and traditional elders in the camp community (Peteet 1987:
33). Popular Committees also conducted numerous infrastructural projects in the
camps (such as the implementation of water and sewerage systems). In addition,
the PLO established different social institutions that were the main providers of
social services and work opportunities for Palestinians.
Since pro-Syrian factions took over Popular Committees in 1988, as previously
noted, those committees have been unable to meet people’s needs and provide basic
services. This has not prevented them, however, from claiming monthly fees for
the improvement of services. In Shatila, the Popular Committee is dominated by
‘pro-Syrian’ factions. Its performance in governing the camp was disappointing,
especially with regard to reconstruction. The committee facilitated illegal construc-
tion inside the camp after Beirut’s construction boom in 1993, when many displaced
during the civil war moved to Shatila because they could not afford to live in other
places in central Beirut.
The Popular Committees are currently seen not only as inefficient but also as the
cause of many problems, using their power to advance their own political and indi-
vidual interests. The words ‘corruption’ and ‘political and individual interests’ are
frequently used in Palestinian popular parlance to describe the Popular Committees’
attitude. This situation has created a tremendous mistrust between the population
and the political leaders and the Popular Committees ‘parachuted’ by those lead-
ers. Consequently, the Popular Committees can no longer play their role in conflict
resolution. Currently, no effective regulatory mechanisms for conflict resolution
exist in the camps. Usually the conflict ends with the most powerful side being
victorious.7 In some cases, key family figures (wujaha’) can play a mediation role
in family or even political conflict.8 The ‘neutrality’ of UNRWA and the limitation
of its mandate to service provision further complicate the situation.
The incapability of the Popular Committee in Shatila to ensure basic needs
eventually pushed the camp’s inhabitants to take matters into their own hands: they
formed a social movement and elected a local committee responsible for improving
living conditions in the camp. The importance of this elected committee is that it
is a unique experience among all the refugee camps in the Middle East region. So,
how were the inhabitants of Shatila able to take such a remarkable step?
The committee of Shatila’s camp population

By 2004, conditions in Shatila had become desperate: electricity was cut off for
nine successive months, and violent confrontations frequently erupted, while both
problems were met with complete disdain on the part of the Popular Committee.
In these circumstances, a group of the camp’s activists decided to break the wall
of silence and to take action. Together, they formed a ‘Follow-up and Reform
Committee – FRC’ (lijnat al-moutaba’a wa al-Islah). Their name reflected
their mission, which was to follow up people’s needs through reform in order to
improve living conditions in the camps. Various social classes and professions
were represented in this committee; included were a mosque imam, doctor, gym
director, electrical engineer, entrepreneur, labourer, employee, teacher and social
worker.
Against this background came the sudden death of the Popular Committee’s
Chairman, leaving a decision-making vacuum before they could nominate his
successor. The two most influential factions in the camp are Sa’iqa and Fatah al-
Intifada, and each pushed for their candidate to become the new chairman. Hamas
was weak at that time and Fatah was powerless in trying to rebuild its presence
in the camp for the first time after Syria’s departure in 2005. The FRC seized this
opportunity and held a public meeting on 9 May 2005 to discuss a solution to
the camp’s dismal social and living conditions (electricity, water, sewage, health,
education, social violence).
Around 200 people attended the public meeting. They concluded that only an
elected accountable body could be a catalyst for improvement. At the same time,
in order to avoid any misunderstanding or misinterpretation, they clarified that this
elected body was not conceived to be an alternative for any existing authority in the
camp, as it would never undertake any political activity. Its mandate was limited
to improving the living conditions of the Palestinians in the camp.
The mosque was the most efficient public space to discuss the camp situa-
tion and to decide on an election principle for this committee. Its imam, Cheikh
Bassam Kayed, had a major role in mobilizing for the election. At that time, the
Palestinian Human Rights Organization (PHRO) had finished a training course
with youth on ‘Observing Elections, Monitoring and Documenting Violations’,
designed to teach participants perspectives on democracy and good governance in
the Palestinian community. The PHRO was thus encouraging the election process
and had established good relations with the mosque’s imam, in addition to PFLP’s
Youth Organization.
Election preparations
The FRC had only two weeks and limited resources to prepare for the elections in a
tense and insecure atmosphere. Despite this, the committee succeeded in setting up
all the arrangements needed. Candidacy and electoral conditions were well defined.
The voters included Palestinian men and women living in the camp and being at
least 18 years of age. Identification cards were required to prove age and residence.
This condition was necessary to prevent factions from sending voters from outside
the camp. An eligible candidate had to fulfil the following requirements: be a male
Palestinian who lived permanently in the camp, be at least 21 years old, hold a
secondary degree at least, be known for his good reputation, not be a member of
any political faction and be able to give time for public service. This gender-biased
criterion was justified by the members whom I interviewed with the assertion
that there is a lot of trouble in serving the community and women cannot bear it.
People were encouraged to apply for candidature. Among 35 applicants, 32 were
accepted and three were rejected as they did not fulfil the requirements. This left
29 candidates to compete for 11 seats. The election campaign was animated by
pamphlets, posters and banners.
202 Manal Kortam
The promised day
Twenty-second May 2005 was meant to be a turning point in Shatila’s history in
general and in the lives of the resident Palestinians in particular. And in fact it
was very significant for the Palestinian population, who were fed up with their
illegitimate leaders and needed a radical change. It was considered a step forward
towards self-development. The participation rate was significant: some 783 electors
participated in the election, about 30 per cent of eligible voters, while the organizers
had envisaged a turnout of 400 voters maximum.
Public places such as youth centres were used as polling places. Standard election
principles, rules and procedures were respected (polling places, ballot boxes, lists,
secrecy, etc). Election observers, such as Shahed, PHRO and youth organizations,
confirmed the integrity of the process. International election principles and a code
of conduct for election observers were guaranteed. This election surprised not only
Palestinians from other camps, but also the Lebanese media.
‘Festival’ was a common word used to describe the day of the election. Joy,
hope, enthusiasm, these terms accurately describe the state of mind of the masses.
Um Mahmud told a reporter from a local newspaper (Assafir 2005): ‘I left my bed
and I came to vote in spite of my illness, hoping that if we have representatives
in the committees we will have basic services and the corruption will end.’ The
atmosphere of Election Day encouraged many people to vote, including former
abstainers who did not believe in the seriousness of the elections.
Efficient in spite of its short period of operation

The Committee of the Camp’s Population (CCP) brought together members from
different social segments; but what is important is that technocrats (engineers
and medical doctors) succeeded in making the CCP very different from Popular
Committees in all the camps in Lebanon. The CCP had two years to achieve the
expected results.
As a start, they organized a meeting with the Lebanese authorities that are charged
with to providing services to the camp (Electricity of Lebanon, municipality of
the region, and the Lebanese Water Company). The CCP made a huge effort and
succeeded in resolving the electricity problem in the camp through direct negotia-
tions with the Electricity of Lebanon Company. They succeeded in persuading
some households to abide by the rules by installing electricity meters to replace
illegal connection lines. Then they purchased an additional electricity transformer
to reduce the load on the two existing ones, in addition to purchasing new cables
and repairing the damage in the network. A French twin organization to the camp
supported them in these repairs. The water supply was and still is a big problem in
the camp, especially with regard to contamination. Even though they tried to clean
the wells of the camp and changed the water pumps, the contamination problem
remained. The committee took over responsibility for garbage collection on holi-
days and weekends. Some residents also went to the committee to resolve their
social and family problems. All CCP decisions were taken by majority vote: each
decision required 7 out of 11 votes to be carried through, whereas in the Popular
Committees, each specialized committee forwards the case to the general secretary
of the committee for a final decision on a given matter.
The end of the success story

The success of the CCP threatened the ‘legitimacy’ of the Popular Committee.
The dominant political actors and factions wanted to prevent a new popular and
dynamic force in the camp from changing the status quo and imposing a new bal-
ance of power. Their political and individual interests were at stake. Water and
electricity services are commercialized in the camps so repairing those services
limited their benefits. Shortly after the CCP elections, the (pro-Syrian) factions
making up the Popular Committee agreed among themselves on a candidate to
replace the former president. This was done to limit the role of the CCP and stop
them from gaining power at the Popular Committee’s expense. Later on, the PLO
established another, rival Popular Committee, which further complicated the situ-
ation. Around six months after the establishment of the CCP, six of the committee
members withdrew their membership because they could no longer ignore the
threats directed at them.
Nearly all the CCP members agreed that popular support was necessary for
their committee to keep on working, to empower its position in the community
and to overcome the vested interests of powerful actors who tried to co-opt the
committee and create distrust between its members. Moreover, one CCP member,
Hassan Abed el Hadi, found that a lack of trust between committee members was
one of the major reasons for its collapse. The refugees’ chronic insecurity and the
lack of protection further discouraged them from expressing their support for the
CCP. They were afraid of the oppression that could be exercised by the dominant
political actors and factions.
Conclusion
Whereas originally Popular Committees were assemblies of traditional political and
social elites and notables, they gradually developed into a political administrative
organ composed only of representatives from various political factions. Popular
Committees can still be found in every Palestinian camp. They are the equivalent
of municipal administrations and are, among other things, responsible for con-
flict resolution within the camps and with the host authorities. Usually, Popular
Committee members have social capital as social or political leaders. However,
they no longer represent the various social groups of their communities. In spite of
the fact that the CCP attempted to remedy the illegitimate structure of the Popular
Committee in the camp, it failed to sustain itself. This led to a serious crisis of
governance that Shatila camp, like other camps in Lebanon, has witnessed with
tremendous repercussions for the life of the population.
Since their first arrival in Lebanon, Palestinian camp dwellers have been under
control, surveillance and ‘state of exception’, not only by the Lebanese authorities
204 Manal Kortam
but also by different Palestinian factions, depending on the balance of power
between them. The lack of a unified political authority has had negative effects on
all aspects of refugee life: social, economic and political. Although the political
factions limit their authority to particular domains in the camps, some of them create
a climate of fear. The lack of protection, accountability and transparency as well
as the lack of democratic mechanisms are a determining factor in the creation of a
culture of fear among the Palestinian communities in Lebanon.
The conflict of interest between various Palestinian factions and the struggle
for power have created a chaotic situation in Shatila as well as in other camps.
However, the Lebanese policy of legal discrimination and marginalization is the
major reason leading to this lamentable situation of the Palestinians. The legal
void characterizing the Palestinians’ status in Lebanon and the ‘state of exception’
imposed by the Lebanese state is manifested by the suspension of the rule of law
(Hanafi 2006).
Internal and external factors prevent the establishment of a proper govern-
ance system inside the camps. The position of the Palestinians in Lebanon and
their exclusion from political, social and economic life in their host country deny
Palestinians the opportunity to create formal structures of representation in public
life. Furthermore, they are marginalized not only when it comes to decision-making
in Lebanon but also in the process of decision-making concerning Palestinian–Israeli
political negotiations. We can also see these dynamics being played out internally
in the Shatila camp where political factions (through the Popular Committees)
seek to prevent the residents from organizing themselves to improve their own
living conditions.
Notes
1 To learn more about the resistance and the survival of the Palestinians in Shatila during
the War of the Camps, see Sayigh (1994).
2 For more details on PLO loyalists and Syrian-backed factions, see Brynen (1990).
3 Richard Cook, ‘Palestinian camps and refugees in Lebanon: priorities, challenges, and
opportunities ahead’, lecture at American University of Beirut, 21 May 2008.
4 The percentage of success in preparatory education by UNRWA pupils significantly
deteriorated from 68.6 per cent in 2004/5 to 45.2 per cent in 2006/7.
5 Male camp illiteracy is two times higher than in Gaza and West Bank. It is also twice
as high as the Lebanese national population (17 per cent compared to 9 per cent).
6 ‘Independents’ was a category created by Yasser Arafat in order to reassure other fac-
tions that Fatah did not have a majority of seats, while he used to make a deal under
the table with the so-called independents to gain their vote.
7 A common expression used by many Palestinian individuals when asked about
mechanisms for conflict resolution inside the camp.
8 Usually each extended family would have one person who is consulted on important
issues.
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Index
Abbas, M. 124 basic services see services

Abdel-‘Al, M. 35 Bauman, Z. 20
Abdellah, G. 34 Beddawi refugee camp 97
Abou Samra, D. 17 Beilin, Y. 158
al-Absi, S. 100, 110 Beirut 7, 67–80
access to basic services 140, 141 Beirut Declaration (2007) (Zaki) 106,
acknowledgement of wrongful acts 153, 108
159–60 Bisher, A. (aka Abou Kamal) 195
action planning 91–3, 95 Blin, L. 45
actors in camp governance 30–2; Yarmouk Bolton, J. 23
camp 40–4 Bourdieu, P. 1–2
Adawi, J. 113–14 Bourj el-Barajneh camp 186, 187, 196
Agamben, G. 5, 81, 178, 199 Bourj al-Shemali camp 59
Agier, M. 4, 24–5, 74 Bradley, M. 155
Ahmad, U. 55 Brah, A. 189
aid 122–3, 140, 141; organizations 25–6 British Mandate 113–14
al-Qaeda 47 buffer zones 21
Amal militia 53, 196 buildings 72; Mar Elias camp 73, 74;
Amari camp 86 Shatila camp 197
Amro, T. 115 Bush, G. 153
al-Anayn, A. 107 Buss camp 79
Aouragh, M. 59 Byman, D. 21, 23
apology 8, 147, 151–6, 159, 160;
Palestinian refugee case 156–9, 160 Cairo Agreement (1969) 36, 70, 193,
Arab League 116, 119, 129, 130 195
Arafat, Y. 51, 58 camp-based refugees 52–3, 68–70; see
Arendt, H. 5 also camps
Armed Struggle Command 108, 199 Camp David Summit 158
Arzt, D. 125 Camp Development Pilot Project 82, 83
Asad, T. 167 camp improvement 7, 81–96, 134–6;
Association for the Defence of the Rights conflictual planning 87–93; hurdles and
of the Internal Displaced in Israel 62 obstacles 83–5
asylum seeking 123 Camp Improvement Plan/ Programme 87,
Australia 123, 151 91, 92–3, 95
Ayn al-Hilwa camp 101, 107; Taamir 101 camp officers 30–1
camps 23, 24–5, 130; governance of
baladiyya (municipality) 40–1 see governance of camps; history of
Barghouthi, M. 43–4 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon 194–5;
Barkan, E. 154 Iraqi refugees 18, 19, 20; kinship and
Index 225
marriage strategies 8–9, 165–79; Directorate of Palestinian Refugee Affairs
memory and reality for Palestinian (DRA) 58, 63
women in camps of Lebanon 9, 180–92; discrimination 120, 130–1, 133–4, 138–40,
Oslo peace process 133, 134–6; refugee 141; Lebanon 117, 130–1, 133–4, 140,
identifications 6–7, 50–64; as spatial 180, 199
devices 18; see also under individual displacement 6, 13–28
camps dissidence 189–90
Canada 123 Doraï, M.K. 79
Casablanca Protocol 116–17, 119, 130 Douglas, M. 14
Chedgzoy, K. 183
citizenship 5, 7–8, 113–27, 136; denial of East Jerusalem 115–16
statehood and Palestinian citizenship economic activities: Mar Elias camp 73–4;
113–16; as a political instrument Shatila camp 197–8
116–19; and the search for a durable education 90–1, 184–5; Shatila camp
solution 124–6 198–9
Civil Liberties Act (1988) (US) 153 Egypt 5, 17, 118, 119, 121
Civitas project 60–1 elections 60–1; local committee in Shatila
Coalition of the Right to Return 58, 62 camp 201–2
Cohen, A. 167 emergency, refugees in 4
Cohen, R. 190 emigration 176–7, 190
comfort women, Korean 151–2, 153–6, employment 140, 141, 198
160 enclaves 15–18, 21
Committee of the Camp’s Population ethnic spaces 15–18
(CCP) 59, 200–3 Europe 123
Committee of Social Development 41 exception: space of 9, 38; state of 3, 5,
community development 83; see also camp 32–4, 178, 199
improvement exclaves 15–18, 21
compensation 8, 151–6, 159, 160; exclusion 48
Palestinian refugee case 156–9 exile 189–90
completeness of reparations 155–6
complex urban environments 81–2; see factional competition 56–7
also urbanization Fadlallah, M.H. 104, 106
conflict 120; carriers of 23; conflictual family 75; refugee status, marriage
planning 87–93 strategies and 8–9, 165–79; two
conservatism 168; conservative Islam 45 discourses of 167–9; women’s role 184,
containment 22; spaces of 18–21 186
control 48, 71–2 family leagues 170
Convention on Refugees (1951) 25, 38, family trees 170–2, 174–5
122 Far’ah camp 58
cousin marriage 166–7, 173, 174, 175, Fatah 43; Nahr el-Bared camp crisis 98–9,
176, 177 107–8
Fatah Intifada 100, 196
Damascus 70 Fatah al-Islam 36, 44–5, 97, 100, 101–2,
Daouk (Sabra) camp 53, 121 105, 107–8, 109
Darfur 26 Fawwar camp 7, 82, 85–93; conflictual
Darwish, M. 120 planning 87–93; initial fears and
Dawson, A. 190 mistrust 87–90; master planning vs
De Greiff, P. 155 action planning 91–3; prioritising needs
Declaration of Principles (DOP) see Oslo 90–1
Accords/Process feminist theory 182
Deheishe camp 86 Ferris, E. 4
democratic centralism 51–2 Follow-up and Reform Committee (FRC)
denial of statehood 113–16 200–1
diasporic refugees 52, 189–90 forced migration 22, 194
226 Index
Foucault, M. 30, 47–8 national identity; UNRWA and proof of
full restitution approach 156 refugee identity 136–8, 139; women in
Future Movement 98, 99, 100–2, 108 Lebanon camps 181, 182–9
identity documents (IDs) 115, 116, 124
gatherings/unofficial camps 67, 197 immigrant communities 69–70
Gaza Strip 20, 115, 122, 137, 138; Israel’s Independent Commission on International
blitzkrieg of January 2009 62; legal Humanitarian Issues 120
status of Palestinian refugees 128–46; infrastructure 73
numbers of Palestinian refugees 3, internal migration 74, 75–6; internally
129 displaced persons (IDPs) 4, 52
gender identity 183, 184–6 Internal Security Forces (ISF) 32, 33, 36
General Authority for Palestine Arab international aid see aid
Refugees (GAPAR) 30, 39, 40–1 International Habitat 37
General Union of Palestine Workers international law 149–50
(GUPW) 43 international migration 74, 77–9;
Geneva Conference (2004) 83, 85 emigration 176–7, 190
Gibson, T. 93 International Organization for Migration
Golan Heights 115–16 (IOM) 18
Goldstone, R. 150 Iran 17
governance of camps 6, 29–49, 93–4; Iraq 121; cartographic violence,
multiple actors 30–2; Nahr el-Bared displacement and refugee camps
29–39, 44–8; three models of 46–8; 13–28
Shatila camp 199–204; Yarmouk 29–32, Islamic Jihad 43
39–48 Islamist movements 44–5
Government of All Palestine (GAP) 115 Israel 15, 20–1, 24, 125–6; denial of
governmentalities 29, 46, 47 statehood and Palestinian citizenship
grassroots mobilisation 93–4 114–16; establishment of the state
of Israel in 1948 14, 72, 194; IDs,
Hadi, H.A. el 203 passports and TDs 116, 123–4; invasion
Hamas 173; governance of camps 43, of Lebanon in 1982 53, 70, 191, 195–6;
44–6, 47; Nahr el-Bared crisis 104–5, laws pertaining to Israeli citizenship
106, 108–9 114; Palestinian right of return 125–6
Hamdan, O. 104, 105, 184 Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations
hamula 167–9 156–9, 160; Oslo Accords/Process see
Hanafi, S. 61, 125, 193 Oslo Accords/Process
Haq al-Awda (Right of Return) movement
58, 62 Jacobsen, K. 77
Harik, I. 190 Jacobson, L.B. 40
Hariri, B. 101–2, 105, 108 Jam’iyyat In’ashal-Usra (Society for
Hariri, R. 99, 100 Family Rejuvenation) 165
Hariri Tribunal 99 Japan, and Korean comfort women 151–2,
health conditions 198–9 153–6, 160
Hilal, J. 51, 86 Jean-Klein, I. 168–9
Hizbollah 98, 99, 103–4, 109 Jenin camp 55–7, 135
Hmoz, Z. (aka Abu Tarek) 87 Jensen, M. 46
Hughes, M. 40 Jewish state 113–14; see also Israel
human rights 5, 119–20; denial of 117, Johnson, P. 85
120 Jordan 14, 23, 25, 26, 187, 193; annexation
humanitarian space 6, 25–6 of central area of Palestine 114;
Hussein, King 118, 131, 134 citizenship as a political instrument
117–18; and GAP 115; Iraqi refugees 14,
identity: camp refugee identification 6–7, 17, 18; killings and expulsions in early
50–64; gender identity 183, 184–6; 1970s 121; legal status of Palestinian
meanings of 182–3; national identity see refugees 128–46; numbers of Palestinian
Index 227
refugees 2, 3, 129; temporary refugee- Madrid peace process 157
citizens 130 Makkawi, K. 33, 99, 102, 106
Joseph, I. 70 Malkki, L. 14, 26
July War (2006) 99 Mar Elias camp 68, 72–4, 79; migration
Jund e-Sham militants 101, 110 and evolution 74–9
marginalization 70, 71–2
Kafr Qasem massacre 147 marriage 8–9, 176–7; between relatives
Kayed, B. 201 166–7, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177
Khalidi, M. 195, 196 mass weddings 46
Khalidi, R. 189 matter-out-of-place 14
kinship see family Mazen, A. 136
Korean comfort women 151–2, 153–6, 160 memory: and identity 182–3; memories
Kurds 14 of war 174; and reality for women in
Kuwait 121 camps of Lebanon 9, 180–92
Microcredit Community Support Program
League of Arab States (LAS) 116, 119, 42
129, 130 migration 67–80, 141–2; emigration
Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) 72, 97, 176–7, 190; forced 22, 194; international
100, 104, 105, 106, 109 74, 77–9; key role in evolution of
Lebanese–Palestinian Dialogue Committee refugee camps 74–9; Palestinian
(LPDC) 32, 38, 135; Nahr el-Bared migrations 74, 75–6; Shatila camp
crisis 97, 99, 102–3, 105, 106 196–7
Lebanon 14, 23, 121, 122, 193; Millennium Declaration 95
discrimination against Palestinian Millennium Development process 95
refugees 117, 130–1, 133–4, 140, 180, mistrust 84–5; Fawwar camp planning
199; governance of camps 6, 29–39, project 87–90
44–8; history of Palestinian refugees mobility 7, 20–1, 67–80; place and 69–70;
194–5; Iraqi refugees 17; Israel’s problems 141–2; world of movement 190
invasion in 1982 53, 70, 191, 195–6; modernist narrative of the family 167–9
legal status of Palestinian refugees 39, Mohanty, C.T. 182
71, 128–46, 199; Mar Elias camp 68, moral damages 156
72–9; marginalization of Palestinian Mujahed, A. 55
refugees 70, 71–2; Nahr el-Bared camp mukhtars 42
see Nahr el-Bared camp; nationality law Mundt, A. 4
amended 5, 119; numbers of Palestinian municipality (baladiyya) 40–1
refugees 2, 3, 129; relations with Murabitoun militia 53
Palestinians and the Nahr el-Bared crisis Mustafa, A. 53–4, 56–7
97–110; Shatila camp see Shatila camp;
urbanization of refugee camps 7, 67–80; Nabulsi, K. 52, 60–1
women in camps of 9, 180–92 Nahr el-Bared camp 59, 72, 135, 180, 187;
legal status 8, 128–46; challenges of the crisis 7, 71, 80, 97–110; governance
Oslo peace process 133–6; evolution of 29–39, 44–8
129–32; and family 172–3; Palestinians Nakba (disaster) of 1948 1, 187, 194
in Lebanon 39, 71, 128–46, 199; narrative, women’s 9, 183, 184–91
problems faced by refugees 138–42; Nasrallah, S.H. 103, 104
Syria 39, 128–46 national identity 183, 186–9, 191; and
Libya 121 local identity in refugee camps 50–64
liminality 21 national liberation movements 51–2
local committees 71; Fawwar camp 86; nationality: laws 5, 119; right to 119–20
Shatila camp 59, 200–3; Yarmouk camp Near East Project (NEP) survey 136–42
40–1 needs, prioritising 90–1
local identity 50–64 non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
longing for return 141 73; NGO-sanctioned family 167–9;
Lutz, C. 15, 16 Shatila camp 199
228 Index
Oslo Accords/Process 56, 116, 129, Peace Implementation Program (PIP)
157–8, 191; IDs and passports 116, 126; 133
Palestinian refugees and the challenges Peres, S. 147
of 133–6; political divisions 98–9; Peteet, J. 182–3
refugee identification 51–2 phantom sovereignty 30–2
Ottoman Empire 113 place 186–7; and mobility 69–70
planning: action planning 91–3, 95;
Pakistan 114 conflictual 87–93; master plan 91–3;
Palestine: British Mandate 113–14; strategic 95
cartographic violence, displacement and policing 36; community policing 33–4 ;
refugee camps 6, 13–28; romanticized police stations 35–6
view of 188–9; UN Partition Plan 114, politics: citizenship as a political
194 instrument 116–19; fall-out of Nahr
Palestine Arab Refugee Institution (PARI) el-Bared crisis 7, 97–110; political
39 divisions 98–100; refugee camps as
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) political systems 193–204
37, 50, 57, 58, 70, 71, 118, 157–8, Pollack, K. 21, 23
196; camps in Lebanon 193, 195, 199, Popular Committees 9, 30, 34, 35, 184;
199–200, 203; democratic centralism de-legitimizing 36–7; Nahr el-Bared
37; Jordan and 118, 121; Nahr el-Bared camp 35, 36–7, 44; Shatila camp 59,
crisis 98–9, 102, 103, 104–5, 105–7, 194, 199–200, 201, 203
108; need for reform/revival 60–1, Popular Front for the Liberation
61–2; relations with Arab governments of Palestine–General Command
and status of Palestinian refugees 121; (PFLP–GC) 196
Vienna document 33, 35 post-colonial feminist theory 182
Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) post-conflict reconstruction 35
42–3 poverty 2, 3, 140, 141
Palestinian Armed Struggle Command property, buying 75–6
108, 199 pro-Syrian committees 44
Palestinian National Authority (PNA) protection 121–4
50, 51, 59, 60, 199, 116, 122, 133, 136, protracted refugees 4–5
173
Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Qaffisheh, M. 114
Research 125–6 Qassem, Sheikh N. 104
Palestinian family 8–9, 165–79 Al-Qutub, I. 68–9
Palestinian General Women’s Union 42
Palestinian Human Rights Organization Rapport, N. 190
(PHRO) 201 Rashidiyyeh camp 75, 184
Palestinian Legislative Council 104 redress 149–51, 159; see also reparations
Palestinian National Council (PNC) 50, reduction of services, perceived 89
58, 60, 61 Refugee Convention (1951) 25, 38, 122
Palestinian national identity see national refugee file 98, 109
identity refugee studies 6–9, 68
Palestinian passport 122, 126 Refugee Working Group (RWG) 157
Palestinian Scout Association 43 regional refugee councils 58
Palestinian state: desire for 190; proposed registration: advantages of 136–8, 139;
in UN Partition Plan 114; as a solution registered refugees 2–3, 128, 129, 147;
125, 126 and responsibility 25, 26
Palestinian Youth Organization 43 rejectionist groups 98–9, 100, 109
Palestinianization 24 religious leaders 42, 45
Palestinians Register 60–1 reparations 8, 147–61; apology and
Partition Plan 114, 194 compensation 151–6; as a notion of
passports: Jordanien 117–18, 121–2; redress 149–51; Palestinian refugee case
Palestinian 122, 126 156–9, 160
Index 229
repatriation 26, 148; see also right of slums 82; upgrading 94–6
return Smith, M. 4
resettlement 142–3, 148 Social Safety Net (SSN) program 42
resistance 58–9, 184, 188, 191; Jenin camp space: ethnic and sectarian 15–18, 19; of
55–7; Shatila camp 54–5 exception 9, 38; humanitarian 6, 25–6;
restrictions 120–1, 126, 133–4 spaces of containment 18–21
right of return 87–9, 103, 125, 128, 135, Spivak, G.C. 182
141, 142; limited to future Palestinian state: family and 167–9; formation 3–4,
state on West Bank and Gaza 143; 52, 62; instability 74; Jewish 113–14
statelessness as a means of preserving (see also Israel); Lebanese and refugee
129–31; UNRWA as an unintended camps 37–9; Palestinian see Palestinian
guardian of 131–2 state; Syrian and Yarmouk camp 41
Right of Return movement 58, 62 state of exception 3, 5, 32–4, 178, 199
rights: civil 5, 103, 169; denial of 117, 120; statehood, denial of 113–16
group rights 52; human 5, 117, 119–20; statelessness 7–8, 113–27; impact of
group rights 52; Universal Declaration 119–21; issue of protection 121–4; as a
of Human Rights 119; see also right of means of preserving the right of return
return 129–31
Road Map 156–7 status, legal see legal status
Rose, N. 46 Sudanese 78–9
Rosenfeld, H. 167 Sunnis 16, 98
surveillance 48
Sabra camp 53, 121 Sustainable Cities Programme 95
Sa’iqa (Vanguard for the Popular Syria 25, 26, 122, 193, 196; Fatah
Liberation War) 43, 196 al-Islam and Nahr al-Bared camp 100;
Saniora, F. 34, 99, 101 governance of camps 6, 29–32, 39–48;
Saudi Arabia 117 Iraqi refugees 17, 18; legal status
Sayigh, R. 51, 53, 54–5, 74, 75, 184, 186, of Palestinian refugees 39, 128–46;
195, 196 numbers of Palestinian refugees 2, 3,
sectarianism 15–18, 19 129; stewardship of Lebanon 99; War of
secular groups 98–9, 109; see also Fatah, the Camps 196
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
security 21–6; critique of security-based Taba negotiations 158, 159, 160
sovereignty 37–9; governance reduced Tabar, L. 56, 57
to 34–9 Takkenberg, L. 52, 124
Segev, T. 147 Tell al-Zaatar camp 75, 106, 186
segregation 6, 29–30, 48 Terry, F. 24
self-organization 57–9, 71; Shatila camp 9, transit, refugees in 4
59, 200–3 travel documents (TDs) 116–17, 121
Separation Wall 116 tribes 16; tribal structure in Yarmouk camp
services: access to 140, 141; provision of 42
basic services 136–8, 139; reduction in Turkey 17
89; services committees 134–5 Turner, B. 20
Sfeir, J. 67–8, 72 Turner, V. 21
Shatila camp 9, 73, 121, 193–204; changes Tyre 165, 170–8
in social fabric 196–7; Committee of the
Camp’s Population (CCP) 59, 200–3; Ugland, O.F. 2
FRC 200–1; governance 199–204; undocumented refugees 122
history 195–6; living conditions 197–9; unemployment 140, 198
Popular Committees 59, 194, 199–200, Union of the Refugee Youth Activities
201, 203; sieges 53–5, 196 Centers 134
Shlaim, A. 114 unions 43, 60
Sidon 101 United Nations Conciliation Commission
sieges 53–7; Jenin 55–7; Shatila 53–5, 196 for Palestine (UNCCP) 132, 157, 158–9
230 Index
United Nations Convention on Refugees urban dispersal 19–20
(1951) 25, 38, 122 urban integration 70–4
United Nations Development Programme urban planning 7, 81–96
(UNDP) 29 urban refugees 68–70
United Nations General Assembly 1; urbanization 7, 81–2, 84, 94; refugee
resolution 181 114, 194; resolution 194 camps in Beirut 7, 67–80
128, 131
United Nations-HABITAT Vanguard for the Popular Liberation War
(UN-HABITAT) 93–4, 95, 96 (Sa‘iqa) 43, 196
United Nations High Commissioner for victim diaspora 190
Refugees (UNHCR) 25, 67, 94, 95, 96, Vienna document 32–4, 34–5
132; applicability of UN Convention on violence 199; cartographic 13–28
Refugees 122; Iraqi refugees 18, 20 virtual cities 81–2
United Nations Partition Plan 114, 194
United Nations Relief and Works Agency Wadi Araba Treaty 134
for Palestine Refugees in the Near East Wadi el Zine 197
(UNRWA) 57, 67, 103, 122, 128, 142; War of the Camps 196
advantages of registration with 136–8, warehousing 4–5
139; basic services provider vs a proof Weizman, E. 81
of refugee identity 136–8, 139; camp West Bank 20; Far’ah camp meeting
governance and phantom sovereignty 58; Fawwar camp see Fawwar camp;
30–2; camp improvement 87–93, 94, Israel’s occupation of 115, 122; Jenin
95, 96; Camp Improvement Programme camp 55–7, 135; Jordan’s annexation
85; Geneva Conference (2004) 83; of 114; King Hussein’s surrendering
governance of Yarmouk camp 42; of legal claim to 118; legal status of
Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Palestinian refugees 128–46; new
Department 83; institutional arrogance category of IDPs 22; numbers of
84–5; Mar Elias camp 72; Oslo peace Palestinian refugees 3, 129; statelessness
process 133, 134; Palestinian refugee 118, 131
identity 24–5; re-coding 23–4; registered women: Korean comfort women 151–2,
refugees 2–3, 128, 129, 147; registration 153–6, 160; memory and reality for
card as political symbol 132; registration women in the camps of Lebanon 9,
and responsibility 25, 26; research 180–92; siege of Shatila camp 54–5
and planning project with Stuttgart Working Group (Fawwar camp) 90
University 82, 83–5; Shatila camp world of movement 190
195, 198, 199; Shelter Rehabilitation World Refugee Survey 4
Programme 92; unintended guardian Wratten, E. 93
of the right of return 131–2; Urban
Planning Unit 83 Yarmouk camp 69; governance 29–32,
United States (US): occupation of Iraq 13, 39–48
14, 15, 16–18, 26; Palestinian emigrants
to 113–14; reparations to Japanese Zaki, A. 102, 105–7, 108, 110
Americans 152–6 Zetter, R. 27
unofficial camps/gatherings 67, 197 Zionism 117

(Routledge Studies On The Arab - Israeli Conflict, 9) Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi - Palestinian Refugees - Identity, Space and Place in The Levant-Routledge (2010)

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(Routledge Studies On The Arab - Israeli Conflict, 9) Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi - Palestinian Refugees - Identity, Space and Place in The Levant-Routledge (2010)

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Palestinian Refugees

Are Knudsen is a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in

Sari Hanafi is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral

The Arab–Israeli conflict continues to be the centre of academic and popular

1 International Assistance to the 6 Zionist Israel and Apartheid

4 Palestinian Civil Society 9 Palestinian Refugees

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

ISBN 0-203-83925-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 978–0–415–58046–5 (hbk)

List of illustrations vii

1 Cartographic violence, displacement and refugee camps: Palestine

2 Governing the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria: the

3 Palestinian camp refugee identifications: a new look at the ‘local’

4 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon: migration, mobility and the

6 Nahr el-Bared: the political fall-out of a refugee disaster 97

7 Passport for what price? Statelessness among Palestinian refugees 113

8 Dynamics of humanitarian aid, local and regional politics: the

9 Reparations to Palestinian refugees: the politics of saying ‘sorry’ 147

10 ‘The one still surviving and viable institution’ 165

11 ‘A world of movement’: memory and reality for Palestinian women

12 Politics, patronage and Popular Committees in the Shatila refugee

Are Knudsen, Bergen

ACOR American Center for Oriental Research

One discovers how the powerlessness that, by destroying potentialities, pre-

Palestinian refugees: regional overview

Jordan 10 338,000 1,951,603

Source: UNRWA (www.unrwa.org).

Refugee crises in the region

Warehousing is the practice of keeping refugees in protracted situations of

Enclaves and exclaves

Re-coding: the mantra of security

[G]overnance is the exercise of economic, political and administrative author-

This chapter recognizes the informality of governance, inspired by Foucault’s con-

Camp governance: multiple actors

Leading authority Local committee (LC) Delegitimized popular

Table 2.2 Historical development of the actors of the camp governance

In 1950s and 1960s LC–GAPAR Before 1970s: Lebanese

The Lebanese case: the state of exception5

The Vienna document

Governance reduced to security

De-legitimizing the Popular Committee

A critique of security-based sovereignty

The Syrian case: Yarmouk camp as space normalcy

Actors of governance: the local committee as a major actor

Hamas: an Islamic governmentality17

I am one of those who approved of some of the accomplishments of Fatah

These new manifestations of a conservative and urban Islam in Lebanon, in such

Conclusion: three models of governance

Camps as the basis of identification: siege records11

Um Ahmad was one of those who shared bread with others:

Self-organization in the camps

A popular desire for authentic representation through elections is evident throughout

Urban refugees vs. camp dwellers

Place and mobility

The camp and the city: local forms of urban integration

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon: a marginalized population

Mar Elias, a camp in the city

The key role of migration in the evolution of the refugee

Due to the fragile political environment in Lebanon, some Palestinians prefer to

Through the settlement of international migrants, the camp is playing a role in

As I am Palestinian I am not allowed to work legally in Lebanon. In the

Thus, because many Palestinian families have emigrated abroad or changed